Such deficiencies are particularly pronounced in devices like smartphones, which are designed to sit mostly inactive for long periods of time throughout the day. Their batteries never draw enough current to heat themselves. But vehicles like drones and electric cars, which demand very high power for shorter periods of time, can generate enough warmth to keep the batteries going, just at a greatly reduced level of performance. While cold weather is a challenge for all electric vehicles, the small size of electric scooters can make them especially vulnerable to failures, as noted by several “juicer” forums on Reddit. Companies like Lime monitor the performance of their fleets, including battery life, but say they are not yet aware of any trends coinciding with this week’s plummeting temps.

The performance of individual products will of course vary based on the manufacturer, battery model, and wear and tear on the device. Apple suggests not operating its phones below 32 degrees F. Amazon says the same for the Kindle. Fitbit, on the other hand, recommends a minimum ambient operating temperature no colder than 14 degrees F for its wellness wearables, which should maintain better temperature control based on continuous contact with your skin. But the same general rules apply to anything that uses lithium-ion battery technology.

So if you have to venture out into the Polar Vortex, store your phone as close to your body as possible, leave the wireless headphones at home, and keep your time outside to under five minutes. If you do freeze your device, don’t plug it in cold. Allow it to slowly come up to room temperature before you recharge it. Failing to do so sets off a different, unwanted chemical reaction that could damage the battery permanently.

Screens

Batteries fare the worst in cold weather, hands down. But a close second are the LCD screens that illuminate our phones, tablets, laptops, digital camera displays, smart watches, and automobile GPS mapping and control systems. LCDs consist of a layer of millions of multicolored pixels, each one controlled by a separate transistor. When turned on, a zap of electricity shocks a tiny, twisted up liquid crystal to attention. In its altered structural shape, the crystal directs light through a pair of polarizing filters and into the pixel, lighting up the desired color. All together these millions of pixels produce all the colors in an image.

But LCD technology gets sluggish when it gets too hot or too cold. Liquid crystals work best in a Goldilocks temperature range somewhere between 32 and 120 degrees F. The colder it gets, the slower the response time from electrical signal to pixel transition, which degrades the image, making it blurry. Some fluids can make crystals functional all the way down into the negative 60s, but most consumer LCD screens crap out around 40 below. “It’s a chemistry that doesn’t work well in the cold for a completely different reason,” says Singh, who has resorted to smuggling a laptop inside his parka when he travels to drone launches in the Arctic. He waits until the absolute last minute to expose the machine to the environment and prays that it doesn’t die before his vehicle is in the ocean. “If we were somehow hypothetically not battery-limited, the screen would be the thing that would get us.”

Sensors

Then there are the tiny gyroscopes, oscilloscopes, oscillators, and more: sensors that collect the information that tells us where we’re going, what time we need to get there, how many steps we took, and how many calories we burned to do it. These components track the orientation of a device and how fast it’s moving through space—crucial tasks for navigating, telling time, and logging activity goals. These sensors’ performance also degrades when the temperatures go extreme.