Lipo advice

[Airsoft-Ed]

I do charge them with the balance lead, the charger's not that crap lol.

I just charged up all 3 for the weekend and the two new ones took barely any time at all, probably less than 2 hours, but the old one took ages, it felt like 3+ hours... but they're all the same.

Any ideas what that might be about? I imagine the old one will have dropped below the 3v per cell level since it was too dead to even cycle the gun when I took it out of it earlier. Should I just bin it now, or what?

 

[Hibernator]

I use a Bantam E-Station BC6. Plenty of cheaper clones around if you can't afford the Bantam version!

 

[Airsoft-Ed]

Holy bajesus, £100 on a charger? I'd rather f*ck up 20 or so batteries over the course of 5 years, it'd cost about the same lol.

 

[Hibernator]

Wow - it was about £80 when I bought it! You know the old saying "buy cheap, buy twice" ;-) I've never had a problem since I got it, but have had a £30 clone stop working and belch smoke so I decided I'd rather be safe than sorry!

 

[snuff]

Lipos should always be charged using a balance charger if you want the best out of them, which means using the small white connector, not the battery to gun connector as with NihM, etc. to charge them.

Should read the small white connector and the battery connector.......just in case of confusion to any new 'softer reading this...

Balancing is vital to longevity it seems.

I tried alarm buzzers when I first got Lipo's but found they alarmed when I full-auto,with all my batteries..I do however use a battery checker(£2.oo).

 

[Deva]

Ed, you really need something to read the voltages of the LiPo's because that really tells you what is going on. It is very hard to deduce anything if you can't do that. The good chargers will tell you such things, otherwise you might like to get a multimeter so you can test them. If your charger is doing things 'properly' then none of yours are toast, as it would not have accepted a charge if the voltage was too low.

Sometimes they can be saved if the charger will refuse to charge, I had a LiPo about .5v below the 3v minimum, gave it about 10 seconds on a NiMh charge which upped the voltage just enough for the proper LiPo charge to work. Obviously there is some risk in that, they do have their own charge setting for a reason..

I've had some LiPo's sat around for nearly a year now on half charge and they don't really drop at all if not connected to anything. They are ~8000mah packs though