Originally Posted by
neospud
The charger only sees one pack. Let's say for example you were charging a single cell pack. You wire them up in parallel by connecting the positive leads to each other and the negative leads to each other. From there you run a single positive lead to the charger and a single negative lead to the charger. So the charger thinks you wired up a single pack. It will have the combined capacity of both packs. The packs are directly connected to each other so they will equalize since they're in parallel.
Now say that each set of these single cell packs is a cell in one of your 3s packs. You have 3 sets of cells wired up in parallel. So the charger sees 3 cells.
Hopefully that makes sense.
I hope I don't cause any confusion but I have an example.
There are some 2s lipo packs you can buy that are 2s2p, where most are 2s1p.
Let's say I bought a 7.4v 5000mah 40c 2s2p.
I would charge it at a 2c rate of 10 amps, and the charger would ideally put ~5000mah.
Well, inside the pack, there are two cells wired in parallel, another pair the same way, and then both pairs are put in series, giving the 2s pack four cells total (hence the 2s2p designation). The charger only sees two cells. Each of the four cells in the pack are actually rated at 3.7v 2500mah 20c, with 1c charge rate.
Parallel charging is essentially doing the same thing as charging this pack, except instead of the two pairs of cells being within the pack, each pair is its own pack.