3-in-1 Battery Balancer, Voltage Indicator and Discharger
I’m glad I finally found this device (thanks to a thread I am subscribed to on RC Groups).
There may be many of you that wonder why I would want one of these.
Let me see if I can explain why:
We do not have power at our flying site, I don’t have a generator and I choose not to charge at the field using my car battery etc. I end up buying as many batteries per plane that I can reasonably fly in one day.
I charge up enough batteries for each of the planes I will take to the field that will get me through the day. For a wide variety of reasons, I may not be able to get all my flights in so I might end up coming home with a few fully charged packs.
Lipo Storage Safety: I have come to believe there is a greatly reduced risk of a lipo fire or at least the intensity of a lipo fire if they are stored in a metal container at storage voltage.
Over the past few years, we have done a lot of experimenting destroying lipos and while we can get spectacular results setting off fully charged packs, we get nothing but a little fizz out of packs that are at storage voltage. I personally know of a few guys who burned down their homes because of Lipo mishaps and that’s a club I don’t want to join!
So, when I get home, I discharge any full packs left over from the day. I have six, good quality chargers (two duo chargers and two single chargers) and I have been using their discharge feature to draw down the packs. There is a lot of heat generated by the discharge function and I have never been happy about that. Recently, one of my Thunder Power 820 chargers started to act funny and started to perform functions at a greatly reduced speed (response to button pushes, etc.) Re-flashing the firmware did not help. I am thinking that I may have damaged it by overheating it by discharging two 5000 mAh lipos back to back.
I was looking for an affordable discharger and found a thread on RC Groups of like-minded individuals. These guys are electronic wizards and have designed and built one. I was in the midst of assembling all the bits and pieces to build one based on their design when someone posted a link to this device.
For about 20 bucks (including shipping), this was a no-brainer.
I have discharged about 10 packs so far and it works like a charm.
Note: I did not receive this unit free for evaluation and/or review, I bought a couple at full pop.
Here is a link to the product:
Here is a link to an even less expensive model that is exactly the same but only uses one 50W bulb as the load. I’d rather pay the extra 3 bucks for the 150W version to save a lot of time babysitting the packs as they discharge.
Here is the link to the thread on RC Groups if you’re keen to build your own. The total cost of the DIY version is more but it is more robust and can handle a bigger load.
Thanks for watching!
Royalty Free Music:
Sex & the City by Re-Drum from Jamendo.com
Crimson Fly by Huma-Huma from YouTube’s Audio Library