post your lipo collection and how you store them

fred0000

Senior Member
saw this on another forum and that it would be neat to see, i'd like to see the flitetest crew's lipo collection, though many planes share the standard 2200mah 3s lipos i'm sure they have a fair collection.
i'll post mine when I get home from work, but thought I could get the ball rolling on the thread.
 

colorex

Rotor Riot!
Mentor
If I must, I'll post my gigantic LiPo collection:

IMG_1683.jpg


I store all these batteries as-is.
 

fred0000

Senior Member
how many lipos you got in there? I got the smaller sacks but they are way to small for my liking, I may have to get one or two of the larger ones, I keep many of my lipos in sacks, others are in metal cookie tins.
 

themajik1

Monkey/Bear Poker
Mentor
Here is my small collection:

IMG_0283.JPG

And here is where I keep them:

IMG_0285.JPG

A Sentry Fireproof box!

Less than $20.00 US
 

fred0000

Senior Member
what are those little packs on the far right? and what do you use them in, that safe looks like a clever idea, i've seen them around here aswell.
 

themajik1

Monkey/Bear Poker
Mentor
what are those little packs on the far right? and what do you use them in, that safe looks like a clever idea, i've seen them around here aswell.

They are 3.7 v 400 mAh, 20C for a indoor foamy. I bought them from Common Sense RC and they aren't a very good battery. Thee instructions said they are reverse polarity and I could not get them to charge correctly no matter what I did, so I have not used them. (Did not want to have a fire). The instructions were so bad with these it wasn't worth my time at the time. Would like to use for some of my micro planes that take a 3.7 150 mAh, I bet I could get unbelievable flight times with them, but just haven't messed with it.
 

fred0000

Senior Member
gotta love the cardboard box case, I know a few people who got the same one haha.

I finaly got around to diggin out my stuff. I race RC cars to so some of these are for that side of the hobby, and RC rock crawlers.

100_0088.jpg


I store them in metal cookie like tins and use lipo sacks aswell.

100_0087.jpg


the chargers I choose to use are iMax B6 chargers. I run all 3 off of a Turnigy TGY 20PRO power supply when i'm at home. (i'm planning to get a 4th charger) I used to run an Electrifly Triton EQ charger and found an expensive charger wasn't really required.

100_0089.jpg
 

Snoggle

Member
the copys (not speaking in particular of the hobbyking ones) are a hit and miss. mine came with an absolute out of line balancer which would always charge cell 2 up to 4.28V which is ABSOLUTELY too much and damages the lipo. I didn't realize this and always trusted my charger until i checked one of my lipos on a clubmates lipo-checker which shows individual cell voltage. i was a little concerned about the high readings on cell 2 (and very low 4,13 on cell 1) so i checked some more fully charged lipos and the result was the same on all of them. so i thought hm maybe its his lipo checker thats not working right so i tried battery checkers from two other clubmates and the results were within ranges of 0.01V difference always the same so it was obvious the weak spot was my chargers balancer. i dumped that charger now and only use it for charging my nimh tx pack but no lipos anymore.

have invested couple of bucks into serious charging hardware (Hyperion EOS 720i Super Duo 3 on a 1500 Watts 0-30V Power Supply).

A picture of my charge setup can be seen below. The touchscreen netbook is used to control the charger and monitor the charging process.

IMG134.jpg
 

fred0000

Senior Member
Lipo cell checkers are unbelievably inaccurate. Check with a volt meter. The ads even state they are useless for finding cell voltage. All 3 of mine undercharge which was anoying at first but it really isn't an issue 4.18-4.19 is close enough.

But yeah I threw out both my voltage checkers and use a multimeter now. After your story I'll be monitoring the packs that come off a bit more but so far so good for me.

That is a very nice charging setup. Do you bring that charger to the field aswell or do you have something else.

I love 4 port chargers and want one. But for the money 4 B6's is basicly the same and the ability to take a very small compact charger to the track or field is a huge plus for me.
 
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Snoggle

Member
Lipo cell checkers are unbelievably inaccurate. Check with a volt meter. The ads even state they are useless for finding cell voltage. All 3 of mine undercharge which was anoying at first but it really isn't an issue 4.18-4.19 is close enough.

oh sorry i forgot to mention that i checked the results the lipo checkers gave with my trusty multimeter at home and the results were (again with bias of ~0.01V) the same as on the lipo checkers.

That is a very nice charging setup. Do you bring that charger to the field aswell or do you have something else.

Right now i take it to the field but operate it on the 12V car battery, which limits the maximum output per port to ~240 watts. Somewhere around march this year my club will get a new 20KW fuel driven power supply to power some 230 volt outlets and then i will take the power supply to the clubs field as well to run my charger and possibly some other club members chargers off it.

I love 4 port chargers and want one. But for the money 4 B6's is basicly the same and the ability to take a very small compact charger to the track or field is a huge plus for me.

the benefit of 4 port chargers is 4 ports, the downside, every one of them i have seen so far has only 50 Watts per port which is okay for small parkflyer packs and especially for indoor shockflyer packs, but when you want to charge some larger packs or charge at higher C rates you are very limited. I use parallel charging on my charger a lot, so i can charge many batteries with the same cell-count in parallel which makes up for having "only" two outputs. but both of them can handle 10x the power of the quad chargers outputs. i am limited to charging two kinds of different batteries with a two port charger, but of those i can charge a lot in parallel.

That's some serious equipment to charge that $10 Turnigy lipo there, my friend. :applause:

you are right as far as this picture is concerned ;) but i usually have slightly more packs hooked up to the charger with parallel charging boards. oh and the battery is 15$, at least its a 40C ;)
 
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FlyingMonkey

Bought Another Trailer
Staff member
Admin
I have an "up" side and a "down" side to my batteries. Ones facing up are charged, ones facing down, are in need of charging.
 

themajik1

Monkey/Bear Poker
Mentor
Nice setup fm!

Good thinking on the up and down for quick reference. Once I have that many batteries, I may go to a similar setup!