Battery Charger Comparisons
 

Looking into buying a new battery charger. What is the benefit of spending $300 vs. a budget charger? Not sure if its worth spending the extra cash. Does it really matter?

For racing a buggy are there any differences that I will be needing to justify spending more on a charger?

The main thing a more expensive battery charger gives you is the ability to charge the battery more quickly. Some of the stock classes discharge at 40A, then charge at 40A in order to get the internal temperature of the battery higher. This gives the car more punch/speed in the early part of the race. You will need an external resistor bank in order to discharge at 40A. Personally I've never done this. I charge at 12 amps and discharge at 10 amps. 10A is the max discharge my 406duo has without using a resistor bank. I have had cheaper chargers in the past and they would only charge at 6A and it took a long time to recharge after a race. Another thing people will mention is the more expensive models will do a better job of balancing your cells which results in better battery life. Good Luck.

Usually the more expensive ones have a 2 amp balance port. The cheaper ones are usually 1 amp

The biggest benefit to a higher end charger is a bigger wattage budget. The majority of sub 50$ chargers have a wattage of 50 or less. This really comes into play if your charging larger cell count packs,

Recently picked up a Gens Ace IMars charger, which offers 300 watts on each channel when using an external DC PSU. My backup chargers are ISDT branded units, and they work pretty good. If your racing 2wd buggy, pretty much anything will work. 8 volts at 6amps, which would be a pretty common charge rate for 2s lipo packs works out to 48watts. If your charging 4/6S packs, at 6amp you need between 100 and 200 watts.

My suggestion would be to pick up something in the 100$ range, and purchase a used HP server power supply. Then do the conversion to get a rock solid PSU. Dont use A/C for the supply source.

I've seen this mentioned before, could you not accomplish the same thing by keeping the battery in a hot box of sorts? All your doing is decreasing cycle life by charging at 8x the c rate of a typical 5AH battery, and when you damage lipos they take less MAH, and punch would drop off quicker.

The most stupid rule in the USA is you are by racing rules not allowed to heat batteries with a some kind of warmer but charging with crazy to unsafe currents to get same results is allowed.

If you're hammering a battery with a 40-amp discharge/charge cycle to heat it up and drop the impedance to get better performance you're probably not overly concerned with the life of your batteries. I believe there's also a rule that your battery has to be within a few degrees of the ambient temperature of where you are racing. I'd also prefer someone use an iCharger to cycle their batteries than sticking a battery in a toaster oven.

Note: Most of the crazy charge/discharge and heating of batteries is for stock racing. If you're racing mod, then just get a decent charger that will charge your batteries. Although, an iCharger is nice to have as it does a good job of showing you the stats of your batteries and helps with maintaining the health of your battery.

I break everything down here:

• Which charger is the best?

Surface temp of the pack?

Honestly surprised racers don't put small heating strips between cells to warm them internally. You could hide it pretty well, and its only cheating if you get caught.

I have seen a Dutch driver where beside the charger cable and balance cable another cable was going into his LiPo bag. He was using a single tire heater on a cheap GTpower electronics set to the max legal 10 degrees above the ambient temperature while the rules say no external heating allowed.
You may say it is no cheating when not caught, to my knowledge cheating is not acting within the limits of the rules with or w/o being caught..

This would be 100 times better than the stupid 40 amp charging and discharging. But it's not allowed per rules. At our club we had to start a 20 amp charging limit because we were breaking the circuit breaker.

I've never been to a track that tested the temp of the pack but it's my understanding there are some that do. Not sure if this is a ROAR rule or not.

There are some people that can't pop a bag of popcorn without burning it and you want to allow them to toss a LiPo in a heating "oven"?

We have a 2C max with a limit of 16A rule and a 20A max discharge rule. But with walking through the pits and seeing many chargers switched off you can imagine they do not want to show you their charger settings.

This is what I use set at the 100 degree mark. Works great!

Expandable Heated Lipo Sleeve (drcproshop.com)