Congrats on your new charger. I Love iCharger, but I would have asked what you are using them for?
Ill post this for anyone else. Charging at high amps is only good for charging large packs (or multiple packs) and for racing cars(mostly just Spec classes). I am not an expert, but the charger doesn't "condition" the battery, charging at 40amps simply heats up the battery from the inside. Heating the chemicals in a battery lowers their resistance and so they will now put out all their current a little bit faster than a non warm battery. That is why this is normally used in Spec Racing as you need every little advantage. This is only half the process. Racers normally fully discharge their packs using a 30amp+ resistor bank first then rapidly charge their packs(40 amps) right before their run to make sure they can get their packs as hot as possible. Most places have rules against heating your pack with a heater (for safety reasons) This discharge/charge method is more effective and legal. The iCharger is one of the only chargers that can do this discharge to a resistor bank and recharge the pack at theses high amps all in one step.

I will say that the iChargers to seem to have a better charging algorithm that most and that is why I have 2.

My 2 cents is the cheap to premium battery comparisons are mostly bull crap. I have 2 Turigy packs from 2013 that I still do Practice and heats with and they turn the same lap time as my MAIN Race pack that is brand new from a top brand. MAYBE the top brands are 1% better (and that is why i bought one)

My batteries usually come off my 406 Duo at around 8.36V or less. Take this claim with a pinch of salt.

The iChargers have several settings to control the end voltage. The "Hold Voltage when charge complete" setting helps keep the packs from losing voltage after the charge is done. I can set my 406duo to a specific end voltage and it stays there within .02v.

If you want the advantage of high current cycling, you had better install your freshly charged battery in your car as the race before yours has 30 seconds left. If your done charging several races before yours, the pack will cool back off, unless you are in a high ambient temperature.

I had a in-expensive ac charger that would only charge max 8a with 80w. The discharge max was 2a with 12w... I used for less than a year, always charging at 1c using balance charge and discharging my batteries at the end of the night to storage mode... took care of my expensive batteries. Noticed batteries were not performing correctly, loss of snap, and had problems with the balance. A friend at the track hooked them up to his iCharger and pointed out to me how high and far apart the IR numbers were in the batteries.... trash...

Lesson learned, it was explained to me that batteries need to be pushed to perform and to keep them working properly and the IR to remain balanced.
New batteries, new iCharger and after 6 months, charging at 3c and discharging at 10a... batteries are just a touch higher in IR than when in purchased them.

I do a hard discharge (40a) and cycle to a 30a charge, then discharge with 10a to storage mode once a month.... does it help?? I don't know for sure, but it seems to work for me.

Which is why I explained you need to set the end charge to 4.22V, the default is 4.20V... if you are still going into tech at 8.36V then chances are their voltmeter is off and you may need to set your end voltage even higher to account for the accuracy of the tool they are using. Many budget chargers will not give you this much flexibility :)

The biggest benefit that the ichargers have over the rest of the chargers out there is their higher cell balance current. No one ever talks about that. This spec is really important when it comes to charging older batteries which have higher IR's and cell imbalance. The ichargers have about 2A of balance current drain versus 400mA to 600mA for the rest of the chargers out there. The benefit is that the higher balance current is actually needed to bring the cells back into balance. The lower balance current is sometimes not enough, causing the chargers to charge forever and sometimes never completing the charge. I have one of those chargers and I have had to borrow friends ichargers at the track to get some of my batteries back in line. My next charger is going to be an icharger.

My charger and my multimeter both tell me it's 8.36 shortly after the charge cycle ends.

There is a feature in the iCharger which lets you adjust the individual cell voltage cutoff to "over-volt" such that the end charge of your 2S pack will finish precisely at 8.40V at rest.

Notice the yellow exclamation point showing that I have set my charger to 4.22V/cell cutoff in the following example:

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/...ebd7a6b6_z.jpg

Notice that the voltage was initially at 8.479V at m01:26 into the charge cycle where I had it set to charge at 40A, but when I took the pic it was dropping with a rate of 24.20A when I snapped the pic. Then at the very end of the charge cycle m07:30 the voltage dropped to 8.409V at rest, this voltage will continue to drop to where you need to time it just right so that your pack comes off the charger within 5-10 min of your tech inspection.

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/...e51e7dd7_z.jpg

In this example, with the voltage coming off at 8.41V where the voltmeter used at our track is rounded to 2 decimal places, all I need to do is turn on my car and the draw from the fans is just enough to get the reading during tech to read 8.40V ;)

*** In order to take advantage of this feature, you need to be using LiHV packs!

Guess it depends on who's rules. ROAR prohibits charging any battery more than 1C. Most tracks ignore this because they want to keep paying customers happy.

The $150 price cap on motors that Trinity keeps violating is another.

Something else I just noticed when looking at the display is that you can easily calculate the inefficiency of the charger, where inefficiency is a variable so you'd need to map these calculations out over a full charge cycle, or perhaps hook up the charger to your PC using the USB port to graph the inefficiency over time, but the information to make this calculation goes something like this:

Bottom left of display shows DC input to charger @ 12.172V x 19.1A =232.4852W
Top right of display shows DC input to battery @ 8.479V x 24.2A = 205.1918W

The difference 232.5W - 205.2W = 27.3W of inefficiency
So 232.5W / 205.2W = 13.3% loss of efficiency at this point in time

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/...ebd7a6b6_z.jpg


With budget chargers, I have used power meters to get this same information and have made readings close to 25% loss of efficiency with some budget chargers and I also found that the lower the quality of the power supply will cause the efficiency of the charger to degrade as well.

Used the charger for the first time this weekend and absolutely loved it. Simple to use and it worked great; I would like to find a discharge solution as bringing 5200s to storage voltage at 2a took over an hour after running a 10 minute main.

I like to run the car down to LVC during open practice... then it should hit storage mode within a few seconds after that.