Why wall-mounted tablets swell, and how to avoid it
If you have mounted a tablet on the wall for Home Assistant, you may already know the ending: a year or so in, the screen starts to lift at one corner, or the back panel bulges. That is the battery swelling. Here is why it happens and what to do instead.
Why it happens
A lithium battery does not like living at full charge and warm. A wall tablet is plugged in all day, so it sits at 100 percent and runs warm behind the glass. Over months the battery gases and expands, and the swelling pushes the screen out of its frame. It is not a defect in one bad tablet, it is what a tablet does when you use it in a way it was never designed for.
The usual workarounds
People try to limit the damage: charge controllers that hold the battery between 60 and 80 percent, smart plugs that cut power on a schedule, or removing the battery entirely. These help, but they are a project, and a tablet with its battery babied or removed is still a tablet, with an account, a kiosk-app licence, and a habit of drifting off the dashboard.
The simple way out
The clean answer is a device with no battery at all. A purpose-built wall panel runs from the wall, so there is nothing to charge, swell, or replace. HAPanel runs from a single USB-C cable, boots into your Home Assistant dashboard, and is built to live on the wall for years rather than to be charged and carried.
If your tablet has started to bulge, stop charging it, take it off the wall, and dispose of the battery safely. Then put something on the wall that was meant to be there.