iPhone won't charge? It's probably lint, not the battery

When your phone won't charge, it's usually not the port

Most people assume a dead charging port or a knackered battery when their iPhone stops charging. Both are rare. The culprit, about six times out of ten on callouts we do in Leicester, is pocket lint. Fluff, dust and fibre compress at the back of the Lightning or USB-C socket until the cable physically can't reach the pins. The phone is fine. The cable is fine. There's just a felt plug in the way.

Five-minute self-test before you book anyone

• Swap the cable. Borrow another MFi-certified Lightning or a known-good USB-C cable. Cables die silently — more often than ports do.
• Swap the adapter. Try a different plug or a different USB-C brick. Bad adapters throw bad voltage.
• Try a different wall socket. Sounds daft but dead sockets and dodgy extension leads are common.
• Wiggle test. Plug in and gently rock the cable. If it only charges at one specific angle, the port itself is likely damaged and cleaning won't save it.
• Shine a torch straight down the port. On a well-used phone, you will very often see a grey or blue plug of lint at the bottom.

If you can see fluff in there, that's almost certainly your problem

Lint doesn't stop charging by blocking the port — it gets slowly packed into a dense disc at the far end. Every time you push a cable in, you compress it tighter. Eventually the cable bottoms out on that disc instead of on the pins, and nothing makes contact. The fix takes about two minutes. But the tools matter.

How to clean it without wrecking the pins

• Turn the phone off first. Always. You're about to poke around live contacts.
• Use a wooden cocktail stick, a plastic SIM ejector pin, or a bamboo toothpick. Nothing metal.
• Scrape along the back wall of the port — not across the pins at the bottom — and drag the lint out in small pulls. You'll usually get a surprisingly large clump.
• Don't use compressed-air cans pointed into the port. Apple specifically warns against it; the pressure can bend the internal pins or force moisture from the propellant into the phone.
• Don't blow into it with your mouth. Breath carries moisture and moisture kills charging circuits.
• Don't squirt alcohol, WD-40 or contact cleaner in there. The port isn't sealed off from the board.

When it really is the port

If you've cleaned it properly and it still won't charge — or it only charges at one weird angle, or you can see a bent pin down the barrel, or it stopped handling data even with a known-good cable — the port itself is gone. That's a genuine repair. We desolder the old port and fit a fresh OEM-spec one at your door in about 40 minutes. Pricing runs roughly £45 on older iPhones up to around £110 on the recent models — well under Apple's ceiling of about £195 for the same job, and you don't have to post your phone away for a week.

Try the torch and toothpick first

Honestly, try it. It's free, it takes two minutes, and it will fix more 'broken' ports than anything else in this post. If it doesn't work, send us a photo looking straight down the port (a torch helps) plus the iPhone model, and we'll tell you whether a clean, a port swap or a battery test is what you actually need. Most Leicester postcodes: same-day callout.