How Cold Is Too Cold For Modern Electronics?

A few nights in the past week the temperature has dropped to around 8F (-13C). I make it a point to bring in my SiriusXM receiver, for fear that the cold could somehow harm to display mechanism (LCD maybe?).

Are modern electronics - my iPhone, my satellite radio, for example - susceptible to extreme cold? Or do I woefully understand the nature of modern display systems?

The only components that are particularly susceptible to cold are electrolytic capacitors. Most of those are rated for operation down to -40 (C or F).

it depends. LCDs may still work at sub-freezing temps, but you’ll definitely notice the response time of the display is a lot slower. But manufacturers may build in whatever of their own safeguards they see fit; I left my iPad in my truck for about 30 minutes when it was 10F outside and it refused to start up, giving me a “high temperature” warning (LOL.)

Automotive OEM electronics are generally specified and designed to work down to at least -40.

Could we add heat to this thread? As what happens when storing electronics in cars–where it can get -20 degrees Fahrenheit in the winter and 130 degrees inside the car in the summer.

I had a cell phone stored in my car and the battery went bad (coincidence or not?)

Can condensation ever cause problems when going from a cold environment to a warm and somewhat humid one? I mean, other than stuff like your camera lenses fogging up. I’ve never had an issue with my cameras (and letting them acclimate for about a half hour, or until I could see through the lens), but I’ve always wondered if there was any possibility of something going amok in an extreme case.

More harmful to electronics is condensation … which can happen as the temperatures drop …

ETA: going from very cold to warm wouldn’t need to be humid … the water causes corrosion …

Every device should have the operating temperature range and storage temperature range stated in the specs. The iPhone specs are here, operating range of 0ºC to 35º C and storage range of -20º to 45º C. I think that’s fairly typical for consumer electronics, though devices designed for outdoor use or automotive use should have wider ranges.

In some (but not all) of my devices, if the temperature is anything short of 60 or so, they think that the battery is dead.

NM

Typical operating ranges for consumer electronics is typically something like 0 to 50 deg C. Stuff designed for industrial use is more like -40 to +85 C and military is -55 to 125 C.

Phones, tablets, and laptops typically have a narrower range than that, partly due to the display and partly due to them cramming 14 lbs of crap into a 5 lb bag. If the operating temperature gets much above 35 deg C or so these devices will often overheat. These types of devices can also be damaged when powered off if the storage temperature exceeds about 40 to 45 deg C. The temperature inside a closed car in the summer can easily get into the 65 to 70 deg C range which can permanently fry these types of devices.

Condensation can be an issue. You are more likely to get condensation going from warm to cold as warm air can hold more moisture.

The internet seems to think that rice is some sort of super-desiccant that will draw the moisture out of your cell phone or tablet. While rice is a mild desiccant, building a shrine to the Flying Spaghetti Monster on your counter and placing the phone in that shrine is generally just as effective. The main thing for moisture is to REMOVE THE BATTERY and let the device dry out. Unlike many internet remedies, rice doesn’t actually do any harm, but it generally doesn’t do any good either.

It’s not usually an issue for most folks, but many cell phones, tablets, and laptops don’t do well at altitudes above 10,000 feet. This isn’t a problem on passenger airplanes since they are pressurized to something like 8,000 feet, but if you use your tablet or laptop in an unpressurized plane you might have an issue. A lot of general aviation pilots use tablets and phones for things like charts and GPS navigation these days, and many of them are in small, unpressurized planes.

Not.

Lithium ion batteries don’t do well in heat. Constantly exposing them to temperatures above 35 deg C or so will drastically shorten their lives.

Yeah, because dry pasta is also a dessicant, right?

These answers seem to all be about operating temperature. It sounds like your question is not about operating temperature, because you are talking about “bringing in” your receiver, presumably instead of leaving it outside overnight. Safe storage temperature will be lower than lowest operating temperature, although I don’t have numbers.

Interesting. I would have thought the other way around, but it’s two people now saying this way is more likely. I’ve never had my glasses (eye glasses or camera lenses) fog up going from warm to cold, but they quite often fog up going cold to warm, so I assumed that was generally the more common case.

Some sorts of electronics, including the CCD that’s at the core of a digital camera, actually work better the colder they get, all the way down to somewhere very close to absolute zero. Back in my days of manning a telescope, we had a Peltier cooler on the CCD that could reliably bring it down to about 20 C below whatever the ambient temperature was (at full blast, it could get it even colder, but then you’d have the temperature of the chip varying as the ambient temperature varied, which was tough for the data analysis: Easier to run at less than full power, so you could keep it at a constant temperature).

EDIT: On condensation, going from cold to warm is likely to get you condensation on the outside of your lenses, as the cold lens comes into contact with the moisture-laden warm air. But going from warm to cold might get you condensation on the inside of your lenses, as the moisture-laden air already inside of the lens cools down to the lower temperatures. Condensation on the inside is probably more problematic than on the outside, for multiple reasons.

The cold glasses cause the warm air to rapidly drop in temperature, making it unable to hold as much water vapor. It’s the air that’s going from warm to cold that causes condensation, and this is sometimes caused by non-air objects having the opposite temperature gradient.

It is the other way around. Condensation happens when air is exposed to a surface that is colder than the dew point. So it can only happen on a surface that’s colder than the surrounding air, e.g. when a cold object is brought into a warm room.

Ah, then I must have misunderstood the other posts. Carry on. :slight_smile:

In the early days of transistor radios, I saw one that had been left on the dashboard of a car left parked in Kuwait. It melted. I think it was all the resins holding things together on the transistor board. , but the outer case was also warped. So a device would have to be designed using high-temperature resins in the chassis.

I’ve posted the above excerpt to the On-Going General Aviation thread over in MPSIMS, soliciting additional discussion of this point there. This is especially relevant for glider pilots (more so than other GA pilots?), who like to play way up there as high as they can get. I mention a flight I had up to 16500 feet, and a recent flight by another local pilot up to 17999 feet. We use avionics (radios, transponders, Garmins and such) as well as smart phone and tablets routinely.

Disk drives don’t like high altitudes - they need the gas density for the heads to fly. So actually spinning the thing up at high altitude may be expected to kill them. I’m not sure about the new helium filled drives - they won’t be vented to the atmosphere, but it would not surprise me to find they have a maximum altitude even when not operating.

Semiconductor junctions stop operating at a critical high temperature, and a lot of the thermal ratings of equipment is a proxy for the design’s ability to not have this happen. Operating electronics when very hot or cold might see resistor values go far enough out of whack that it matters, and here the precise composition of those resistors may matter. As noted above, electrolytic capacitors may actually eventually freeze. Electrolytics are big problem with high temperatures, as the liquid can and will boil. This eventually results in the capacitor either leaking everywhere as the pressure forces the liquid out, or in the worst case, exploding. Power electrolytics are usually manufactured with a cross scored on the top of the case, which is a controlled weak point so that if they do let go, they do so in a manner that is less likely to wreck everything around them. But even if they don’t fail like this, ordinary high operating temperatures shorten their lifetime.