gdipilato

new to battery powered rc. have been a nitro user all along. just bought a stampede 4 x 4 and was anxios to get a 3s for it so i bought one that has a 5400 mah capacity. i got the accucell 6 charger but now am realizing that the charger wont charge the pack fully. i did some research and i guess it will charge it to roughly 4500 mah. my question is if this is bad for the battery. also if i get something like a 2s 6000 mah lipo will this charger be able to charge it?

modelfan

iTrader: (1)

If that's a new pack you just charged I wouldn't worry about it. It's fully charged. All lipos come with a charge already. Don't get too caught up with capacity as you will never have your lipo fully drained to confirm this.
Just check the voltage of each cell. Fully charged they should be at 4.20v each or thereabouts. To me this is a more important value to be paying attention to than full capacity numbers. Also this is how you monitor how balanced your cells are over time.

You won't have any issues charging a 2s 6000mah battery. You'll only be able to do it at 1C though as this is only a 6 amp charger.

Duster_360

iTrader: (21)

the Accucel-6 will charge your 5400mah fully, it will charge the 6000mah fully as well. The limit is due to the chargers output power - so for a 3S, most current you'll see is 50w/12.6v ~4amps. When the lipos voltage is lower, the charger current will be higher - at 11.1v for example current will be 4.5. Charge current has nothing to do with mah - how much goes into the lipo. It does have to do with teh time it takes to fully charge. Yours will take longer since you're going to be charging at less than 1C charge rate. This charger has a capacity cutoff - make sure if charging lipo, this is set to off - otherwise, it will stop charging at exactly 5000mah which is the default - this setting is for NiMh, not lipo.

You shouldn't be discharging any lipo to more than 80% of the label capacity, so for a 5000mah lipo, you shouldn't be seeing more than 4000mah go back in on re charges - if you do, you're discharging to too low of a voltage and need to set your lvc slightly higher. You will not get good cycle life from lipo deeply discharging them like that.