Newb charger question
 

Sup guys,

Im not gonna say im new to the sport/hobby, but there are some areas of it that i have just "gotten by" with.Mainly chargers.

My crew of friends and I all run nitro off-road, truggy's, Mt's, and such and it seems that everytime we get together, one of us has reciever/battery issues. we all run regular hump packs, all around 15-1700mah and we all charge with those retarded wall chargers.

Ive been kicking the idea around of converting my LST2 to take a lipo for the reciever, keeping it nitro. Mainly because it has 2 metal steering servos and a digital throttle servo.

I put a brand new 1600 5 cell in the truck today, it chargered for 12 hrs, and went dead in less than 30 minutes.Im thinking its probably beat from the start, but who knows.

question 1- how important is it to discharge these batteries before charging them?

question 2-is there a decent priced charger/power supply that can charge regular nimh and lipos?

does anyone else have any tips?Even if its something simple, post it up, because i feel like im overlooking something in the battery/chraging area of my nitro rc.

New NiMh pacs sometimes need 'conditioning' since thay may heve been sitting for a while with no use before you bought it. Even if its pretty fresh, the usuable capacity of the pack will increase until its had 8-10, maybe 12 charges. They usually start off having less capacity than a pac will after those 1st dozen or so charges.

A wall type plugin charger is ineffective compared to a peak style NiMh charger that will detect the peak assoicated with NiMh cells being full. When the packs are performaing lik ethey should, they don't need discharging every time they are charged. I discharged mine avery 5 or 6 charges at low rate to try to equalize cell voltages. I also charged my rcvr packs at 0.5amp and never more than 1amp - these small 2/3a cells aren't made to take the heat that charging at 1C type charge rates cause.

As far as a good charger, here's a cheap charger with a good rep, has a lot of features, has a builtin balancer for lipos and will take care of NiMh as well -

http://www.hobbypartz.com/thac6smbachw.html

Get a good charger and cycle your pack - you should see performance get better in terms of discharged mah. If it doesn't, then the pack really was beat.

does that charger need a power supply? I read through it, and it didnt mentioned, and it has an ac in port, so i assume it does.

any recommendations on the PS?

Sorry, I didn't mention that - it is an AC/DC charger, just plug it in.....

well i just found out that the "shitty" traxxas charger i have is a peak type, and also switches to trickle after a charging cycle.

which is a huge step in the right direction for me.

My question is, how long should a let my 16-1700 packs trickle after a 90 minute charging cycle?

You batts should be getting warm when they're charging - this peak charger could be 'false peaking' and terminating the charger early. If the batts not warm, just re-start the charge again. New batts do this more than old ones and some chargers seem to have more of a prob with it than others. This may be what wrong rather than the batts needing cycling.

As far as trickle - all I've seen is rate advice ~C/20, not time. Your charger has a fixed peak sensitivity and what I saw it tends to be high, so maybe a few hours of trickle charging could be beneficial.


If they batts have been getting warm, you need to cycle them several times to see if they'll come back into good shape.

when you say cycle them, does that mean to charge them and then use them=1 cycle

or just 1 charging cycle?

when i initially hooked up the traxxas chrager, it got a full cycle in.I then unplugged everything for 10mins, and then chargred it again and it peaked in about 20 mins.

Came home today, plugged it in again, and it peaked in like 10, and has been trickling for the last 2-3hrs.