Davidka

iTrader: (86)

There's no good reason to charge any faster than 1c. Unlike older battery tech, there is no perfromance advantage to higher charge rates. The argument could be made that higher rates are simply faster but how fast do we need to charge? It still has to taper after the voltage tops out.

Higher charge rates are supposed to shorten the cycle life but I haven't seen testing that shows this either way.

tfa8rva

iTrader: (4)

No one is claiming a "performance advantage" by charging at a higher c rating. The reason for charging at a higher c rate is solely for faster charge times. You can buy three high quality packs like Thunder Power or Hyperion and charge a 5000mah pack at 5c in 15 minutes and keep running all day, or you could buy 10 cheap packs and charge at 1c to keep running all day. In my experience, charging at a high c rate has no affect on a quality packs lifespan. What kills packs is running them all the way down to LVC or over amping them. So to say "There's no good reason to charge any faster than 1c" is not true IMO.

Duster_360

iTrader: (21)

+1 The only reason for high C charging is to cut charging time. This seems to have been driven from the plane side of the hobby and their desire to have only a few lipos capable of high C rates allowing the short charging times to keep them flying all day. Hyperion maintains there is no cycle life detriment to charging at high C rates. Thunderpower makes the same claim and they have an even higher charging C rate.

The 1st generation of lipo media had a chart that showed life versus charge rate and there was a significant loss in cycle life as charge rates claimed. This linkage between life and charge rate stems from that data based on that older, original sensitive media. This was also the media that was sensitive enough to cause fires and pretty violent venting. There have been major improvements in the passing years, addition of fire retardent, nano technology, better substrate materials and so on. Whats available today is far superior to that earliest lipo media.

You do have to have a good enough balancer that it can keep up or be utilized in only the CV portion of the charge where its not going to slow charging own. My iCharger lets you select which part of the charge the balancer is active in.

fallguy

iTrader: (3)

i just want to do it so i can have less lipos.. now for racing you could get away with just one lipo..