Originally Posted by Cain

personally if you have a battery cell that is THAT different voltage wise (you sure you didn't mean 3.71v?) I would say you have a weak cell. I would carefully watch that particular cell as chances are, its no good.



Something to keep in mind, and this is based on my experiences with 1/8 electric back when 20C was considered "High" and we pushed it to the limits on cutoff voltages. If you are not balancing your packs every charge, if you do have a situation of a weaker cell, you could potentially be over discharging that poor voltage cell during use since cut-off voltage is a measurement across all cells combined, not individually. (now, that would be all cool feature on an ESC!)

And if you have a weak cell and you are charging your packs without regards to the voltages seen across each cell (which usually a balance charge setting takes into account, though it may be different on other chargers), you could *potentially* overcharge one of the cells.

We had someone do this who was new to lipos. He went ahead and charged a pack he had been using for awhile (7.4V pack) without balance charging it.

His charger without that setting turned on ignored the individual voltages of each cell and just went for what was the total voltage to charge to. Well, one cell was very low, the other higher, and he ended up from what we can tell spiking that other "high" cell way up there causing a severally puffed pack. Pretty surprised it didn't just burst as we are talking stovetop popcorn size and cause a fire which considering where he was charging the pack (and not in a liposack) would have been quite expensive.

So in short, can you do it? yes, you can charge your lipos without balancing them and probably 99% have no issues. My luck though, I end up being the 1% that does.

But considering that in general the amount of time saved at least from what I have seen on my chargers is extremely minimal (especially with packs that don't have issues as when in use, the voltages should be pretty close anyway during discharge) I don't see a benefit in not balance charging the lipos.

Just my opinion, ultimately people have to make there own decisions on what they want to do.

Originally Posted by negatv1

I'm never in that much of a hurry to not balance charge my cells (or I just have enough packs and charger ports, that I don't care).

At the very least I figure that by doing so allows you to identify weak/damaged cells earlier than just waiting for physical signs. I just don't see the downside of balance charging every time.