im fairly new to the lipo game, so i've recently purchased a lipo reciever pack for my 1/8 buggy from ZIPPY it's a 2S2P and it has three plugs, the main plug,balance plug ! what is the 3rd plug used for??? i know it has to do with the 2P but why????

You understand that a 2S2P is a total of 4 cells? Basically, a pair of 2S lipos (2 cells wired together in series for 7.4v nominal) are wired together in parallel to increase capacvity (mah). You have a balance connector for each pair of 2S lipos and thats the extra lead you're seeing.

I'm not sure how you're going to balance this lipo though - can you supply link to this lipo on HC? I suspect they have some kind of adapter for it to use for balancing. Some balance adapters let you plug in 2 separate lipos, maybe this was what they intended??

yea but the third connector is not a balance plug it has only 2 wires not three like the other balance plug and the third plug is weird???

Typical balance setup takes 1 more wire than you have cells so the 5 wires would be right, but how or what are you supposed to plug them into?

When you plug your main power leads into charger, it is going to charge all 4 cells. So if you plug the 3 wire balance plug into 2S balance port, that will see just the 2 cells that those wires are attached to. What about the other 2 cells?

Thats why I was wondering if there was an adapter where you'd plug both sets of balance conns in and it would see/balance all 4 cells even though to the charger you're really only charging 2 cells.

There's something missing here.

got it guys sorry but i gave you the wrong info it's a 2S3P lipo reciever pack, one plug is the power, 2nd is balance, 3rd is to plug into a UBEC/BEC to protect thr reciever

Thanks for clearing that up, that was the lipo I was looking at yesterday at HC. So when you balance this, charger will see it as just 3 cells.

Guess you can't have it both ways - charging the cells in parallel and balancing the cells in series. So this is charging and balancing in parallel.