Ep 11: What Powers Your Radio?

[00:00:04] Welcome to RC Plane Lab, a podcast for anyone interested in rc airplane. We’ll share tips and tricks on how to build models and talk about successful flights, epic crashes and everything in between. Visit us at rcplanelab.com to sign up for our email list and to ask us questions. You can also text us or leave us a voicemail at 818-351-9846. Please help us out by rating and reviewing us in your favorite podcast app. Thanks for spending time with us today. Now here are your.

[00:00:35] Hosts: Ron and Tom. Hello everyone, welcome to the RC Plane Lab podcast. I’m Ron and I’m Tom. Today, we’re going to be talking about something that we have all dealt with, something that we have all used and had to charge and had to discharge, no matter what kind of airplane you fly, whether it’s electric or nitro or gas. We’re going to be talking about batteries. Some of the batteries we’re going to talk about are the nycads, the nimh old school. We’ll talk about the LiPos and we’ll also cover some

[00:01:07] Of the like the newer a123s, and we’ll kind of go over some of the, the connectors too, that you would use to connect those to each other or to your charger or to your airplane. So right, I think we ought to get started probably with the oldest of the bunch. Okay, the nycads. I don’t remember using nycads. Yeah, I think there’s probably a couple planes that I’ve bought at like swap meets that have had those in there, but I’ve replaced the

[00:01:42] Receiver packs and those kind of things so maybe a little bit more about than I do you.

[00:01:48] Want to kind of talk about it. Sure, yeah, because, because they’re old, like me, I, I have quite a quite a bit of experience with nycads and but to be honest, we used to treat them pretty much or very similar to how we, how we treat the nickel metal hydrods which we’re going to talk about later. Yeah, so I mean, they were, they were good at what, at what they did in their time. They, they were the hike. You could get high capacity and you could, you could, they could.

[00:02:21] Support high discharge rates. We could. We could hit them pretty hard with high charge rates as well they were. They were prone to developing a memory, which nimhs are also, but the nycads didn’t seem like- or at least my experience with nycads didn’t seem like the memory was all that hard to overcome. Hit them hard a couple times, especially if they’ve been in storage, that would seem to be the worst thing for them because they self-discharge.

[00:02:51] Over time. So you hit them hard a couple times with the charger and discharge them a couple times, you’ll cycle them. We had chargers back then that were capable of high, high charge rates and discharge rates and it would cycle the packs automatically and usually that was enough- at least in my experience- to sort of bring that or bring them out of that memory loss phase, if you will. But it did seem like there was always some sort of permanent damage and once, once you started down the path of memory loss, just like with aging, they, they.

[00:03:26] Kind of they kind of just progressed. There was never. You were never really going to fully bring them back and you definitely would shorten the life of the battery with those high discharge rates and they, they don’t seem to be as durable as the as the nimh batteries seem to be. Yeah.

[00:03:43] So I looked a little bit of things up on them too, because, like I said, I’m not familiar with these as much so you, you said that they do lose a charge while they’re kind of in storage. What I found is that, yeah, it’s about 10 percent in a month, just when it’s when it’s sitting there not being used. Yeah, that sounds about right actually, yeah, and, and most of those were in like the double a size kind of thing, right. So these were used more for receiver packs, not necessarily for flying your.

[00:04:12] Airplane correct, right? Yeah, yeah, and because of the, because of the high self-discharge rate, back in the day we used to keep niacad, especially our receiver batteries. We used to keep them when we’d put the airplanes away for the winter, we would take the receiver pack out of the airplane and put it on our bench and put it on a trickle charger. And ace, ace rc used to make them and sonic tronics made them and a bunch of other companies made them. But it was like a, it was just like an add-on. You would, you would plug your regular charger into the wall, your, your regular wall.

[00:04:46] Charger that came like with like your radio, and then you would plug in line with the receiver lead, this little add a trickle device, and what it would do is it would step down the voltage and from coming from your wall charger to about two tenths c, roughly about 200 milliamps, let’s say, and that was enough to keep the battery topped off and enough to kind of stay, even with the self-discharge rate. So that’s 10 percent per month. Is that what you said? Yeah, that’s.

[00:05:18] What I what I found? Yeah, so that if you do the math, that’s probably what those small little add a trickle devices would do is. It would just barely keep ahead of that self-discharge rate. So it would maintain your battery over the winter, which is why those things don’t work with nickel metal hydrides, I guess, because those probably don’t self-discharge.

[00:05:41] As steep we will get to that because that is actually the opposite of being true.

[00:05:47] Really okay. All right, so the thing okay. So both nimh and the nicads each cell is 1.2 Volts, so being yeah, correct, so being the double a size, a normal double a battery that’s not rechargeable is one and a half volts, 1.5 Volts. So that’s, that’s really close. When it’s fully charged it’s going to be close to that 1.5, 1.6 Volts, which makes it a direct replacement not only for rc airplanes but like for using it in things around.

[00:06:20] The house, but the only problem with that is you don’t want to use it in, or you didn’t want to use them in things that would. That would kind of be stored for a long time because of that discharge. Nice thing about them, do I found, is that they will. They will have about 2 000 charge cycles before they kind of wear out, and out of all the batteries we’re talking about, that is the highest cycle count that I could find. So, yeah, yeah, that is actually kind of nice, and they’re they’re not too expensive. The cool thing about them, too, though, is that they can be stored.

[00:06:55] In a discharge state without really having issues being charged later. A lot of the other batteries that we deal with today, you’re very specific on how you charge them. These kind of just seem like they were use it and forget it kind of thing. It’s not something where you had to take a lot of special care of a of an icad battery. So right, and that would be nice to kind of get back to with some of these batteries. But you’ll, you’ll see, with some of the ones that we use,

[00:07:27] Now they have a, there’s a lot that they provide that the nicads didn’t okay. So the, the other things. That was kind of bad- that kind of got people away from nicads- was that they were really considered to be toxic. They had cadmium in them. That’s kind of what made the, the battery being nickel cadmium, so they couldn’t be disposed of in a landfill. The or the other problem, too, is if you needed a higher capacity battery, you really couldn’t get those.

[00:08:01] Because they were limited to the capacities that they could fit in that cell size. So you didn’t really have a lot of a lot of options when it came to that. So that’s kind of that’s.

[00:08:14] Kind of the nicad battery. Yeah, I think I think the highest capacity nicad that I think I ever used was around 2000 milliamp per cell subsea size. So yeah, see, going, going back I think.

[00:08:28] Like the first rc car or truck I bought actually came with a nicad pack, the more I’m thinking about I wanted to say it was a seven cell maybe. Is that? Does that sound right? Yeah, that’s. Yeah, that sounds right. And I want to say that was that was like 1600 milliamp hours. Yep, that sounds right. So, yeah, not a lot of, not a lot of, not a lot of battery that you could use for a long time. So those died pretty quick. Yeah, that takes us on to the nickel metal hydride. That’s kind of what took.

[00:08:59] Over for the nicads. Yep, they really didn’t come out until the late 80s, so they’re kind of a newer type battery compared to the, the nicads I mean. The nicads go all the way back to like the late 1800s, early 1900s, not obviously for rc airplanes, but in different uses. They also are the 1.2 Volts per cell. When they’re fully charged they’re 1.5 To 1.6 Volts, give or take somewhere. Okay. And I found, like with cycles- I said 2 000 cycles for the nicads, with an nimh.

[00:09:36] You really, depending on size, can get between like 500 to 1 000 cycles out of them. It seems like the higher, the higher the capacity battery, the less cycles you get, so there’s there’s something with quite a dramatic difference. It is quite a quite a difference actually. The nice thing about them, though, is they will hold between like 30 and 40 percent higher capacity than the nicads, so I think, like of a similar size. You mean, yeah, so you like your, your double a size, whatever that’s.

[00:10:11] Called. I think you can get them in. Like 2600 milliamp hours is what I just bought for the, the receiver packs I got for the Telemaster. So that’s quite a bit higher than what the nicads were. So this- we kind of touched on it before this- still the nimh battery still has the memory issues that the nicads did. So they you can bring them back easier than the nicads. So

[00:10:45] And really to kind of reset that memory, what you need to do with your nimh batteries is make sure you drain them all the way down and then charge them back up and do that every 10, 15 cycles. It’s not something you have to do all the time, yeah, but when you’re dealing with half the

[00:11:00] Number of cycles that you could do with the nicad those extra cycles to bring it back add up quick.

[00:11:06] That’s true. I never thought of that. Yeah, it’s. I guess the good thing about those is they’re cheap. I think the receiver batteries I just bought were nine bucks or ten bucks a piece, something like.

[00:11:18] That so really that’s I yeah off amazon I just bought a couple of six volt nimh packs and I think.

[00:11:25] There were seven dollars each. Maybe that’s what mine was too. I don’t remember right off hand, but it was. It was very cheap. Yeah, it was sub 20 bucks for both of them delivered and yeah, I mean, you can’t- I don’t think you can beat that really. For brand new batteries that’s a pretty good deal and new.

[00:11:41] Batteries know it’s cheap insurance right oh absolutely even if they’re just 10 bucks.

[00:11:46] Yeah, yeah, I agree. So the nice thing about the nimh2 is they work in a wider temperature range than the nicad’s did, so you will be able to- oh, that’s right, yeah, yeah, you’ll be able to pull out more power from them, right? And I forgot about that. I do remember.

[00:12:05] Back in the day with the nicad batteries, we had to be really, really careful on hot days, especially when, when, when charging them, because they would either not want to charge or they would get really, really hot and they would fall’s peak and do all these nasty things.

[00:12:20] Yeah, I forgot all about that. Yeah, so I mean, that’s, I guess, kind of why we went with them instead of nicad’s too. Yeah, and some of the other things- nice, having that extra capacity- well, that too. And so when everybody changed to nicad’s- or I’m sorry to nimh over nicad’s though- the chargers changed, so they had to right so they don’t charge as easy as the nicad’s do. I know that they’re sensitive to being overcharged. If you overcharge them, that really.

[00:12:53] Kills the batteries quickly and they get really hot. Yeah, and I so I don’t know exactly how the chargers work, but I know there’s a whole thing that chargers go through to charge these batteries. Actually, the chargers we use today are really kind of amazing pieces of equipment when you look at them. It’s true there’s a lot, a lot built into them. Yeah, but do you, I mean, do you kind of have any idea how the, how the nih batteries get charged? Yeah, I mean, we, we charge them same sort.

[00:13:25] Of profile, if you will, as we would charge a nicad. The difference is in the is in how the charger detects the peak when the battery has reached a peak state of charge in the old nicad days, when, when a battery would, if you were to look at it as like a graph, you would see the steep curve as you’re dumping voltage into the battery as you’re charging it, and then when the battery would reach its peak, it would simply reverse that, that path, if you will, and it would drop the voltage would drop off really steeply and the chargers were very

[00:14:00] It was very easy to pick up that change in voltage. The nimh batteries, on the other hand, same deal. They sort of have a steep curve on the initial ramp up for the charge, but as it gets closer and closer and closer to maximum capacity or the point at which it won’t accept any more voltage, it doesn’t. It doesn’t reverse directions very quickly, it. It kind of hangs out up there at the peak of that of that curve and it comes down actually very, very slowly. And if you continue.

[00:14:35] Dumping voltage into it that it’ll eventually come down and the part the charger can detect it. But by that time usually the battery’s hot and you’ve done some damage. With the new nimh battery that came on, they sort of had to change the way chargers detected that, that delta peak change in voltage. That had to be much, much, much more sensitive. So whereas on the old nicad chargers let’s say that the delta peak detection was

[00:15:06] Say 0.1, A tenth of a volt, because- and that was safe because it would drop off so quickly it would go- it would change a tenth of a volt on its way down, really, really quickly, within a couple of seconds, and the chargers had no problem picking that up. The nimhs aren’t like that, like I said, so that we’re we’re dealing with delta peak settings of 0.03 Or 0.04, So three, one hundredths or four, one hundredths of a volt, so that they can, so that

[00:15:38] The charger can really see that peak and shut off in time before it damages the pack. And that was the biggest change in the chargers and the charging profiles that we used for nimhs.

[00:15:51] So the what they were looking for. They just kind of had to be a little bit smarter and detect a smaller voltage drop, and that’s really the only difference in charging them then pretty.

[00:16:01] Much. Yeah, I mean, it’s the same. It’s the same. We’re just dumping direct current voltage into the battery at a, at a preset gosh. What’s the word I’m looking for? Just gave me thank you, just like we did with nycats. The only difference really is that is that is the delta peak detection.

[00:16:21] Yeah. So then with the new batteries, the, the charger just kind of had to keep up. They had to get a little bit smarter as the batteries progressed also. So and we’ll kind of we’ll notice that is a trend with all batteries: as you get new batteries there’s got to be a little bit different way to charge them to keep them safe and make them long time right. So the other thing with nycads- though- so I’m sorry with nimh that we talked about a little bit before- the high self-ditch or discharge rate. The nimh battery discharges while in storage.

[00:16:59] What I found was 20 self-discharge in the first 24 hours after charge. Wow. So you have a huge drop in the first day after you charge it and then it kind of levels off, the same as the nycads did with 10 or so a month afters. So that’s about twice as fast as the nycad batteries. So the best practices with the nimh batteries is make sure you charge.

[00:17:29] The night before you go out to the field. One of the worst things to deal with is getting out to the field not having a charged battery, or losing a plane because you didn’t do your proper checks to make sure that you have the voltage that you were supposed to have, so right. Where you really don’t notice this, though, is because the, the, the nimh batteries, can hold a lot more their, their bigger capacity, so they’ll hold more milliamp hours, which the milliamp hours is kind of the size of your fuel tank. The bigger, the bigger milliamp hour capacity you have for the.

[00:18:05] Battery, the bigger the fuel tank and the longer it will run, whatever it is running. So since you do have that 30 to 40 percent amount of headroom over the nycads, you really don’t necessarily notice that the drop going from an icad to an nimh just in capacity because it’s so much more. So make sure you always charge those batteries the night before you go fly so you don’t lose an airplane. Yeah right, that’s good advice. I mean I most of the time when you’re when

[00:18:36] You’re just flying a little nitro plane or something like that around. You’re not using a lot of power running your servos. They don’t do a lot when you’re in the air. You’re not pulling a lot of power out of it, so those receiver batteries last a good amount of time, which is why 2600 milliamp hours is enough for an afternoon of flying, with some leftover. Usually, yeah, yeah, depending on what you’re doing, but most of the time. So still getting to the habit of checking them between flights, just make sure you have the, the voltage in it and do a.

[00:19:07] Load test and all that stuff and you should be just fine. And if worse comes to worse, throw on a charger halfway through the afternoon to kind of peek it off before you, before you fly again.

[00:19:18] Well, and the chargers today are so convenient that you can- a lot of them will run off a 12 old battery. You just hook them onto the battery of your car while you’re at the field and charge one while you’re flying the other one. Not a big deal usually. Do you have anything else on nimh, or should we just move on? No, I was gonna. I was gonna mention that. Getting to that self-discharge, I seem to remember when we, when we made the conversion, or shortly after we made the conversion to nimhs, or when they became popular, I should say somebody, somebody compared it.

[00:19:50] To me as like a faucet, so a nicad. Let’s say you’ve got a faucet and it’s half turned on, so you’re only getting half the power, so there’s more restriction to losing power, so to speak, whereas the nimhs were. So everybody was saying at the time anyway, they were so much more efficient at transferring power and stuff that they self-discharge because there were just no resistance to prevent it. I don’t know if that’s accurate or not, but that was, I don’t know something.

[00:20:20] I thought worth it was worth mentioning. Yeah, I don’t know. Actually, I know like there are actually some people that will still recommend the nicad batteries and you can still buy the nicad batteries for like a like bigger planes that will have more of an amp draw than the nickel metal hydride. So okay, like the nicad’s handle amp draw of a higher, higher amp draw, better than the nimh do. So I, I, yeah, I’m not sure I don’t know how that would work. Maybe somebody if they know what they’re.

[00:20:54] Talking about more than we do can reach out and set us straight on that okay no that was that was.

[00:21:01] Really that was all I all I had left for nimh well then we’ll move on to my favorite battery.

[00:21:09] The, the LiPo, lithium polymer. Boy, what a revolution. These things were huh right. This is the battery that really opened up electric flight, because of the amount of power, the amount of energy you could store in such a small, in such a small battery. I mean really the size on it. It’s amazing. It truly is. But not only that, but how fast you can take it out. Yeah, you can. You can really pull a lot of, a lot of amperage, a lot of power out of these batteries in a very short amount of time.

[00:21:43] Without damaging them. So it wasn’t until- actually it was about the same time really- that they came out, that they were commercialized as the nimh did. It was only five years after that, something like that, right, but where they’ve made a big step forward, like I said, in capacity and how fast you can take that power out. Not only that, but you can. The self-discharge is really.

[00:22:13] Really low compared to any of the other batteries we’ve talked about so far. With a LiPo, you get one and a half to two percent discharge a month just from, for or just from sitting. Gosh, that’s almost nothing. Yeah, really I mean. So if they’re going to sit for a long time, keep them at storage charge. You’re going to be fine. You’re not going to have a lot of degradation. That’s one of the nice things about them. So charge cycles- that’s that’s problematic. So the charge cycles, how many you get?

[00:22:44] Out of it really depend on how you treat your battery. So you, I mean there are batteries that if you, if you abuse them, really, within two or three charges you can kill the battery completely. Oh yeah, most of the time you get like between one to three hundred, five hundred charges out of them maybe, but it depends on how, how close you are to pulling out the pretty much to turn the faucet all the way on the, the closer you are to pulling as much of that power out quickly as it, it will.

[00:23:20] Give you, the faster you’re you’re damaging that battery or the LiPo batteries all have labels and the labels are very important to know what the battery is. You need to pay attention to those. They, they all tell you the labels, tell you the capacity, so it will tell you how many milliamp hours that battery holds. They, most of the time, will tell you the cell count, whether it’s a 2s or 3s, but they will also- why shouldn’t say also, they will tell you for sure, the voltage.

[00:23:51] So whether it’s a, so like a 2s battery is going to be a 7.4 Volt, a 3s battery will be 11.1 Volts. So what? The way they figure that out is on a LiPo. For the other batteries we talked about the nicad and the nimh- they were 1.2 Volts of cell. LiPos are 3.7 Volts of cell, so the voltage is higher per each cell. And the nice thing about LiPos, too, is they don’t have to be formed into.

[00:24:24] A specific shape, they will work. I mean, you can even curve them around, you can pretty much put them in whatever shape you want- not you as in like us, but when they’re manufacturing the battery. So the other thing you’ll find on the on the label will be the- yeah, sometimes- not always on this one- the c charge for or the c rating for charging. What c rating is how fast you can either charge it or discharge it.

[00:24:57] So one c is going to be charging it at the capacity times one so a 5000 milliamp hour battery is going.

[00:25:10] To be charged at five amps does that make sense yeah because a thousand milliamps is one amp so.

[00:25:16] Five thousand milliamps is five amps, right? So if you have like a 1300 milliamp hour battery, you charge it at 1.3 Amps, right, unless it says 2c or 3c. But really like for me, even if it says you can charge it two to three times the capacity, I don’t like to do that because that will, while it will take it, it will degrade the battery faster. So absolutely yeah, the best practice for charging is always going to be just charging at 1c or less than that, right? Yeah, it doesn’t have to be exactly 1c if

[00:25:49] You, if you have time, you want it to go for a couple hours and then just let it go for half of that. So charge it at two and a half amps if it’s a 5 000 milliamp hour battery. So with saying that also, when you’re charging normally what you’re charging at 1c is going to take one hour to put in because it’s 5 000 milliamp hours. So to charge it you go to the five amps and putting five amps in is going to take one hour to charge. So whenever you charge at 1c, you’re going to be

[00:26:19] Right at that one hour mark. Give or take a little bit. There’s going to be some fudge factor in there. But you’re going to be right about one, one hour to charge well, and usually you’re not starting from zero milliamps, that’s correct. Yeah, you’re right, that’s. It’s not usually right at zero.

[00:26:36] So the other thing on the label that you’re going to see is the c rating for the continuous just or discharge. So that’s going to be how many amps you can draw continuously out of that battery. A lot of times you’re going to see like 20c, 30c, I mean. Some of the new ones are even like 60c. So what that means, this one I’m looking at here is a 50c. Oh, okay, the one I have on the charger right now is actually a 30c, I think. Okay, but it’s, I’ve had it for a couple years.

[00:27:12] So the okay to figure out how many amps you can pull out of that is simple math. So if it’s a 5000 milliamp hour battery and it’s a 20c battery, then that’s going to be 5 amps, because we change that to amps and then multiply it by 20. So you will be able to pull out 100 amps from that battery continuous without technically harming that battery. So that’s what it’s designed to do. So you can. 100 Amps is a lot out of a battery, I mean really, yes, and it goes up from there. So what’s yours? How about?

[00:27:45] How big is the battery? This is a little 2200, three cell. Okay, it’s rated at 50c, so 2200, so 2.2 Amps times 50 and that’s a small, small battery then, and you can pull out over 100 amps out of that little battery without hurting. That’s impressive. That’s very impressive. Yeah, so you don’t have to take the power out that fast, and it’s always a good idea if you want your batteries that last a.

[00:28:15] Little bit longer to kind of overbuy on your batteries. So your esc is going to tell you what its amp draw is, and that’s pretty much what you’re going to want to be look at, or what you’re going to want to what you’re going to want to look at. So if you have an 80 amp esc- and you have, it’s going to be a 5000 milliamp hour battery- you’re going to be better off buying a 30c battery than a 20c battery. Now, the 20c battery will technically work and it’s not going to give you any problems.

[00:28:47] You’re not going to have anything happen because of the, the current you’re pulling out of it, but it’s always good to have some headroom so that the battery kind of is not working at its full power, full capacity. Does that make sense? Yes, any, yeah, anytime you push something to the limits on what it’s designed to do, you’re going to be hurting that more than if it’s working at half power or something like that. So you’re going to get more. You’re going to get more charges out of it. You’re going to get more life out of this battery if you take care of it and don’t push it to its

[00:29:21] It’s, it’s rated capacity for withdrawal. Okay, other thing that you’re going to find on a label- most of them- I should say not all of them, because I looked through all mine to see if these all had this peak discharge c rating- so that’s going to be like how many amps you can draw for short burst, five to ten seconds, something like that. So with the same like 5000 milliamp hour battery- let’s say it’s 20c, continuous, 30c burst, that means continuously- you can pull out 100 amps without issues. You can.

[00:29:54] Also pull out 150 amp out of that battery for short bursts of five to ten seconds without damaging the battery. So incredible, yeah you’ll. You’ll see that in different batteries. Like I said, not all of them are going to have the peak c rating for peak discharge. Some of mine don’t. Some of mine do so, it’s just look on the battery. But all of them for sure are going to tell you what the voltage is or tell you the cell count. That’s very important to know if it’s a 2s or a 3s.

[00:30:27] 4S, 5s, 6s, whatever. Yeah, especially if you have a charger that doesn’t auto select the cells, right, which detects it when you plug it in? Yeah, which I don’t. So I still have the old style where you have to tell it what you’re charging so it knows how to charge it. But the nice thing about LiPo batteries: they don’t have any memory. So it doesn’t matter what you pull them down to, they will not, will not remember what they, what they can take out of them.

[00:30:59] So you don’t have to worry about the memory effect that you had to worry about with nikads or nimh batteries. They also one of nice things is the, like I said before, the, the high discharge rates. You’re not going to get those discharge rates out of the nikads or nimh, it’s just not. The batteries aren’t designed for that, so it’s not going to happen. And the- the capacities, like I said, are just huge compared to some of these other batteries too. So you can you get much bigger fuel tanks, if you will, for your airplanes. Yeah, so the other thing that is nice about these batteries:

[00:31:34] So your usage in these batteries is in a narrow band of voltage. You have like 4.2 Volts is fully charged. So on a 3.7 Cell, 4.2 Volts is fully charged. You never want to go under three volts per cell.

[00:31:54] Right, right, I always like to stop at like 3.3, Depending on what you, what you go to. I know, like with rc cars, some of the ones I have- you can actually set the low voltage cut off for 3.0, 3.1, 2, 3, 4, 3.5 Volts. I always went to 3.3 On those with airplanes it’s a little bit different. I don’t. I don’t let the voltage cut off do the work for me, I just set a timer. Yeah, because most of the time with the timer you’re going to be safe, not draining it too far, and it’s also

[00:32:31] Going to not get to the point where. So what happens with airplanes is when you’re flying around and you hit that little voltage cut off, you lose power. So it will turn off your propeller and that’s how it tells you that, hey, it’s time to come in and land. Yep, so you can reset that, you go down to idle and then you can slowly give it some power. But if you start pulling out too much again, it goes to the low voltage cut off. It’s going to happen again. So the best thing is just set.

[00:32:59] A timer letting it go to the to the low voltage cut off kind of plays into what you were talking.

[00:33:04] About operating at its maximum limits. That will kill him much faster, right, but so what I was kind of getting at, though, is what’s nice is you have between three to three and a half volts, all the way at 4.2 Volts, so there’s not a lot of difference in voltage between a fully charged battery and an empty battery, so you don’t lose a lot of power when you’re flying. You’ll, you’re going to lose some rpm, because obviously the voltage is dropping a little bit, but it’s not going to be a huge difference between the beginning of the flight and the end of the flight. Oh, yep, yeah, I see.

[00:33:36] What you’re talking about, the discharge curve, right? Yeah, sorry. So when it, like I said, fully charged, 4.2 Volts, fully empty, three volts to three and a half if you’re being safe- so you’re not- you’re not going to be running all that or running that down to like under a volt per cell to where you’re going to notice a huge difference in power and performance. So the nice thing about those is, like I said, that the band is very small in what you take out, so you don’t see a difference in performance between the beginning and the end of the flight like you would with other batteries.

[00:34:10] Yeah, I remember with the nicads and even the nimhs, with cars- I used to be in the cars too, but there would- there would be a definite gradual decline in performance from start to finish with a, with a kind of a sudden ramp off of voltage at the end of the charge. But yeah, it’s not. It’s not like that with the LiPos. It’s very, very, a very flat, if you will discharge curve, which is cool because, like you said, it’s the same power from almost from start to finish.

[00:34:42] Yeah, when I used to run cars a lot more too, I mean you’d be, you’d be racing down the straightaway and you wouldn’t really notice any difference. It’s not like they slowed down a lot. But then all of a sudden you hit that low voltage cutoff and then that would just stop, which is fine, you’re running the car, so it’s not going to go anywhere, and then you can kind of baby it around and get it back to you so you don’t have to go out on the track to pick it up. But it’s when I did have some of the nimh batteries also. Yeah, you could definitely tell you get halfway through the battery and you’d be going a lot slower. You get to the end of that.

[00:35:14] Battery and it’s just barely crawling around the track trying to come back to you. So, yeah, the LiPos make a huge difference. Oh, yeah, yeah, they do. Only thing, though, with LiPos is make sure make sure you are running it on an esc that is designed for LiPos- almost any of them nowadays are. I mean I don’t know if you can buy one. That’s not right that you’re not able to use LiPos with, but with some of the older like tracks of stuff that I have and some of the aftermarket parts for those,

[00:35:45] They were really before LiPos, and so for me to run LiPos in that, first off you have to check your voltage to make sure it’ll it’ll work right, and you also need to put like a, an external like alarm. You can get alarms to plug into the, the charger port or the, the balance lead on the LiPos, and then it’ll kind of start beeping if it gets to a certain cutoff. So just make sure your, your esc, can handle LiPo, which, like I said, anything today I can’t imagine that it wouldn’t. So that’s.

[00:36:18] Kind of a moot point. Did you want to talk about LiPos as receiver packs and airplanes and kind of some of the issues you might run into with that? Yeah, take over, go on. Oh, okay, well, I mean, so you mentioned the different voltage per cell, and so a standard three cell LiPo is 11.1 And a two cell LiPo is 7.4, And so a single cell is 3.7. So most airplane receivers are designed.

[00:36:51] To operate around the six volt range, so a two cell LiPo. Unless your receiver is modern and designed to handle the high voltage and it’ll say usually hv on it somewhere, we would have to run the LiPos through some sort of a- oh gosh, I a voltage regulator. A regulator, thank you, which I still have, a bunch of those in the drawers here and stuff. But then even those are becoming less and less necessary because most of the radio manufacturers have kind of accepted the reality of how good the LiPos and

[00:37:26] The and the other lithium style batteries are, and they’ve designed to operate at those voltages. So you have to be careful about powering an aircraft radio with LiPos. You have to make sure that if the radio is not designed to handle that voltage, you’re using either a regulator or- well, I guess- a regulator or a smart tray with one built in the other thing you have to watch out for.

[00:37:51] Though not only your, your receiver servos- some of those are not. If it’s not a high voltage servo, they are not meant to take the higher voltage with a like a 2s LiPo. Sometimes there was there’s.

[00:38:05] Like a band of receivers out there that would accept the high voltage from the battery, and their output voltage was designed to handle standard analog and digital servos at six volts. So you have to do your reading and do your research when you buy a receiver. Or, if you have a receiver, get out there on google and find the specs and make sure that output voltage from the receiver, no matter what receiver battery you’re using, matches up with the servos that you’re using. Yeah, good tip.

[00:38:32] Always check to make sure you’re not going to burn them out, because that will. That will burn them out pretty quick and oh yeah, been there done that they’ll last just about long enough to get up and start flying. And then you lose everything and crash. So well, I haven’t. Haven’t lost one in flight.

[00:38:47] Due to that, but I’ve lost several servos on the bench because I’ve neglected to check the output voltage of the receiver and whether it was would jive with the servos that I was using.

[00:38:58] Oh yeah that luckily I’m cheap and I buy cheap servos so well you don’t want to mess up.

[00:39:06] Anything too expensive, right? So now you- you talked about all these wonderful things with the LiPos- is there, you want to talk about any of the negative stuff? Oh sure, LiPos are scary batteries. Well, they can be like when they first. When they first came on and first became popular in the in the rc, in the hobby I was, I was very afraid of them. I didn’t want them in the house. In fact I kept them out in the garage, which, with the heat in my garage, was not a good idea either. But anyway, that was probably worse on them than keeping them in your house, probably, but it was. It was just they were so.

[00:39:42] New and they hadn’t- I don’t want to say they hadn’t worked all the bugs out, but they hadn’t really worked all the bugs out- for especially for homeowners to use these things, yeah, but yeah, I mean they’re they’re, they really are safe. I mean you really almost with the chargers and all the stuff that’s out there now that are using these things. I mean I don’t want to say they’re foolproof, because it’s still ways to mess them up, but if you’re even just

[00:40:12] Slightly careful you’re not going to have any issues with them right I mean treat them well you.

[00:40:18] Know if they get, if they show signs of degradation, if they, if they get puffy at all, like my rule kind of is: if they get puffy, don’t fly them. I’ve seen other people, like the person I’m talking to now, that has flown with some LiPo batteries that I would be questionable about and would not have since. I have since gotten rid of those batteries. Yeah, so the

[00:40:49] Okay. So puffy, puffy LiPo. What causes that? I don’t want to go in too deep on it, okay, yeah, because I won’t understand you anyway. Well, okay, so let’s just let’s touch on the basics. So a battery has an anode, a cathode, and electrolyte or electrolyte. So with a LiPo, the electrolyte is going to be your, your like the, hence the po, LiPo, lithium polymer. It’s a polymer separator that goes between the

[00:41:23] Cathode and the anode. So what happens when it’s either well? Age causes it, overcharging, charging too fast causes it. Charging them to too high of a voltage causes it. Taking them below three volts causes it. What about storing them at the wrong voltage? Storing them at the wrong voltage will speed it up, okay. So that’s kind of part of the aging thing. So with LiPo batteries you want.

[00:41:55] To store them at a certain voltage. We’ll get to that in a minute. Any deviation from that is going to hasten the death of your battery. So I like how you put that: hasten the death of your battery. Just be careful, we’ll make them live as long as we can, as long as we take care of them. But so when you see the puffing, that happens when that little separator, the polymer separator, breaks down. So polymer is another word for plastic, right? Yeah, more or less pretty much.

[00:42:30] It. Yeah, that’s. That’s the part that goes between and kind of separates, like I said, your anode and your cathode. So most of what is in that is going to be lithium and oxygen. So when that breaks down, that is the oxygen kind of coming out of that electrolyte. So they’re a LiPo battery. I don’t know if you’ve ever taken one apart. They are made up of a lot of layers that are very, very, be honest.

[00:43:04] I’m still scared of them, so I don’t mess with them, like I don’t take them apart, like I get nervous even just soldering my connectors onto them. So well, no, I’ve never had one apart I have had to get.

[00:43:16] Rid of some before and before I got rid of my, I discharged them all the way as low as I could go and I did cut one open just to kind of see what it looked like. There’s a lot of like fan folded layers in there. I think it was a three cell. I don’t remember if it was a four or five thousand milliamp hour battery, but when you unfolded those battery it was a. It was a big battery. It was one of the first ones I got for my rc cars here. But anyway, when you, when you unfolded the, the stuff that was inside of that- it was five or six feet long it was. It was a lot of stuff. That’s kind of.

[00:43:51] Pressed into that. Okay, so what? What happens? Well, first off, when it, when it puffs, it’s starting or it’s starting to get dangerous, the, the chemicals that are in there. The problem with them is, when they do short out, they kind of fuel their own fire, and that’s why it’s so hard to put like a LiPo fire. When that happens, what, what comes out of that puffiness, is oxygen and oxygen. Obviously.

[00:44:23] Makes it easier to burn. So it’s it’s supplying its own oxygen to the fire and that’s what makes it hard, that’s what makes it difficult to put out sometimes. But so those layers, as they start to puff up the they get more room between them and in order for that battery to work well and to work at its full, full extent, that needs to be pressed as tightly as they can. When that puffs up, the ions can’t go between the anode and the cathode and you really lose. You lose the.

[00:45:00] Ability to take out the power as quickly as you need it. So okay, if it’s puffed too much, really those batteries are useless. You’re not going to be able to get your flight times out of them. You’re going to pull, or you’re not gonna be able to pull the power out as fast as you can without harming the battery. Like I said, discharging it too fast past your c rating, charging it too fast over one c or whatever they rated at, can do it. Improper storage can do it, and just time.

[00:45:32] In general, because these batteries, from the day you buy the battery it’s breaking down and it’s kind of eating itself away. So these sticking right, they don’t last forever and that’s why, like I said, you get one, two, three, maybe five hundred cycles out of them if you really take care of them. But don’t don’t count on them lasting too long. So that’s kind of the LiPo puff and why it’s a good thing to. When you see a little bit of a puff, you’re probably fine, just know you’re probably.

[00:46:03] Going to be on your last season. But if it puffs up quite a bit- especially if it wasn’t like that before you flew and you came back and you saw it was all puffed up, just it’s done, set it off to the side, let it cool down, let it kind of sit on its own and just don’t touch it, then you’ll have to kind of go through. You’ll want to get it, get it taken care of and recycled at a later date, but at that point just kind of let it sit and see what it’s going to do. That’s that’s my recommendation. At least don’t that’s good advice. Yeah, that’s when they get dangerous, like

[00:46:36] I said when so when the battery has puffed has puffed to the point that it’s round.

[00:46:46] -Huh. So what you’re saying is that’s bad. Yeah, and some of the some of the batteries that I’ve seen are bad. Yeah, like I said, some of the ones I have- if you press on them you might get it to move down 16th of an inch or something like that and you can kind of feel a little bit of puffiness to it. But those batteries are. I think one of them I have is: oh, I date my batteries when I get them. I think the one I’m talking about was: oh, that’s a good idea. Yeah, I, I used to mark down how many times I charge it, but then I got lazy and didn’t want to do that.

[00:47:22] But I think that one was 2015 so it’s about five years old and it’s it’s probably to the point where.

[00:47:29] I need to be getting rid of it. But so how that brings me to, I’ll ask you: when you’re done, go ahead. Well, I lost my train of thought, so I’m done. Oh well, you were talking about you’d had it five years or so and it was probably time for it to, for you to be done with it and to get rid of it. And my question was going to be: how, like what? How do we get rid of these things? I mean, these are, I’ve heard that these are safe. We can just throw them in the landfill. Well, that depends on where.

[00:48:02] You are. It’s not necessarily a good idea to do that just because recycle them there. There is material in these that can be reused. I think some of these- I don’t remember if the LiPos do or not, but some of them have cobalt in it- and those that material can be recycled. Batteries in general should be recycled, not just thrown away, but okay, the way to make these safe from so what I’ve done and I don’t know. Don’t take my word on this. I haven’t looked up you.

[00:48:40] Know how to officially destroy these batteries. But what? What I’ve done in the past? Two things. So I will hook up, drain it as much as you can, just on your airplane, get it as low as you can, get it voltage wise. Then you can either, like, put a light bulb or a some sort of small charge, like, if you’re in the right, depending on what kind of voltage you’re you’re working on, you can use.

[00:49:14] Like some led strip lights are 12 volts, some of them are one and a half volts, some are three volts, just depending on what kind of light you have. But use something like that in order to slowly, slowly pull a draw out of it when it gets down low. What I have done before is just put it in salt water and I’ll make up a container and put a decent amount of salt in it. Get it warm so it gets dissolved. Then normally I like to go outside with it so that I’m

[00:49:48] Not inside my garage or inside the house especially, but I will leave it outside for upwards of sometimes a month and a half, two months, just to make sure it’s completely shorted out and there’s no power left in there. That’s what I did with the one I was talking about that I that I took apart after it was out there for quite a while. I knew that when you check it with a, a volt meter and stuff, there was nothing in it. It showed nothing. So you’re able to kind of

[00:50:19] Be less scared of them, because when the when the power is out of them, there’s nothing really that’s going to happen. So once that’s done, set them off to the side and find out what your local recycling, battery cycling place or something like that is, and take them into there.

[00:50:35] Okay, I mean, that’s what I do. So deep discharging them down to 0.0 Volts, that’s, that’s not enough discharge to set these things off. What do you mean? Well, it the fire that these things can potentially cause. That’s, that’s a, that’s a chemical reaction. It doesn’t really have anything to do with.

[00:50:59] Electricity. Right, I see what you’re saying. Well, what? And please, if I’m wrong, somebody correct me, because I’m not an expert on this. By any means, it’s the pulling out fast that destroys it.

[00:51:12] So if you slowly discharge it- and that’s what the salt water does- it’s a very slow discharge. I mean, like I said, it takes a long time to do. That is okay and especially because you’re not trying to save the battery, like if you get down to where it’s very low, you’re not going to want to use that again. It’s just going to give you issues, it’s not going to charge right and that’s when it can get dangerous. So as long as you, as long as you do it slowly, from what I understand, you won’t have any issues. And, like I said, please, somebody reach out if I’m, if I’m telling a lie, because if we’re wrong on this, I will.

[00:51:45] Take this down and we will we will correct what we said but that’s how I understand it yeah I’m just.

[00:51:52] Scared of them, so, like when they’re, when they’re done, I just cut the connector off and actually they’re all the ones I was planning on getting rid of. They’re sitting right over here on the on a box in the basement. I needed to take them out, figure out what to do with them. Well, okay, so the other.

[00:52:06] Thing when you cut connectors off one wire at a time and make sure they don’t touch, I know so don’t. I mean don’t just like take your scissors and go straight across them, because that’s going to short.

[00:52:15] Them out and that will get. And I cut them at different lengths too. Yeah, like I’ll cut, I’ll cut one wire and then I’ll flip it over and cut the other wire really short so that they don’t touch. Yeah, that’s, that’s a good idea.

[00:52:26] That’s how I do it, yeah, yeah. So the with LiPos, like I said, just be careful and treat them well. Yeah, do not over discharge them when you’re flying. If they get below that- three volts per cell, that’s the kind of the magic number with them- you’re really going to mess them up and they’re going to get useless very quickly. So just take care of it and you should be okay, cool.

[00:52:54] And don’t rely on the low voltage cutoff of your electronics v controller yeah that’s that’s.

[00:53:01] Kind of a, a last resort you. You want it there to kind of be a, a just in case I need it thing, but you don’t want to ever need it. So the best thing, like I said, set that timer and don’t necessarily go all the way down to zero percent too. I mean I don’t like to discharge my batteries that low. Yeah, figure out what your capacities are, what you’re gonna be flying at, and, like I said, I always cut off maybe eighty percent of the battery or so, sometimes even less, because I’d rather fly a little bit less now and have that battery last longer than have that extra couple.

[00:53:34] Minutes of flight time now and have to replace it sooner yeah right and to be honest most.

[00:53:42] Modern electronic speed controllers. You can. You can actually adjust that low voltage cutoff too. Yeah, yeah, and I mean you’d have to. You’d have to look at your speed controller. But again, I, I like you, I set a timer on my transmitter and when it goes off, I make for the runway. Yep, that’s when.

[00:53:58] It’s time to come in and then, and then you can check it- you’ll know how much charge you’re putting in and that’ll kind of tell you how much you took out, obviously, and then you can adjust accordingly. So if you only took out twenty percent of your battery, double that timer and go ahead and, yeah, fly a little bit longer, but don’t get down to zero. I mean, I don’t know if I have a five thousand minute lamp power battery. I don’t want to be putting five thousand minute lamp powers in it to when I, when I do it, I want it to be. I’m happy if it’s four.

[00:54:29] Thousand something in that range. Yeah, just leave a little fuel in the tank. But I guess I’m the same way with cars, like real cars. When I drive I don’t like to get below like quarter tanks. That’s when I’ll stop. There’s two people. The car says 50 miles left on the on the dashboard- well, I got to get gas. Or other people. It says zero, well, that’s fine, I know my car, I got another 20 miles in me. No, I don’t like doing that at all. I’d rather not walking my wife.

[00:54:57] Oh, plenty of time. Yeah, that’s not me. Yes, I’ve had to take. I’ve had to take gas to her a couple times I think I.

[00:55:07] Talk about that some other time yeah I think I’d do that once and then after that she’s on her.

[00:55:11] Own, yeah, all right. So, so that’s LiPos. How about do you want to talk about the a123s or lifepo 4s, or lithium ions, whatever you want to call them? Yeah, we can. We can talk about that one.

[00:55:25] Those are the ones I like. Well, that’s good, because I don’t know nearly as much about those, because I’ve never dealt with them before. I know you have some for receiver packs, is that right? I do, yeah, so why don’t you, why don’t you tell us a little bit about them? What’s the difference?

[00:55:39] Between that and the LiPo. Well, one’s called LiPo and one’s not. I’ll be honest, the science and the technology- I’m not. I’m not real keen on the differences these are. These are made of a lithium, iron phosphate combination. So as far as the actual construction of the cell, yeah, I can’t really talk about it because I don’t know that much. Yeah, but I know they’re round, kind of like what I’m used to with the old nicad and nickel metal hydride batteries, so they’re familiar.

[00:56:13] But bigger though right they can be yeah oh can you get them in the like the double a size.

[00:56:19] Very similar- yep, oh, I didn’t know that. Yep. And the reason I really like them is because they’re they’re more closely related, voltage wise, to nickel metal hydride. So usually a life battery you can get away with a standard six volt radio system, because they’re only 3.3 Volts when fully charged and when they’re fully discharged you can get them.

[00:56:50] Down to- I think it’s 2.3 Or 2.5, Something like that. Anyway, they’re more closely related. So you don’t have to have a lot of the fancy. That’s not so fancy anymore because it’s fairly standard. But back when these came out, the, the high voltage receivers and high voltage servos were fairly expensive because and you had fairly limited selection of what you could get. So the life po battery or the lithium iron batteries were nice because you didn’t require anything different. You could just buy this new technology battery, which was kind of the best of both worlds it. It had the

[00:57:26] The long life and the, the, the non self-discharging features of the LiPos. But you also had the somewhat durable nature of the of the nickel metal hydrides. So that’s why I like them and they’re. They’re easy to deal with. You don’t have to balance, charge them. You don’t have to do any of that stuff. You can treat them. As long as you’re charging them with the correct charger, you can treat them almost like you would treat an icad or a nickel metal hydride. They’re not really designed.

[00:58:00] For high discharge rates, which is perfect for receiver battery use. Yeah, because I don’t run a lot of the high voltage, high amp draw digital servos of my airplanes or I’ll gang several like on my big airplane I have two analog servos that are fairly low draw to run a big aileron instead of one big high amperage digital servo. So perfect for me that they’re not high.

[00:58:31] Discharge like the LiPos. They do charge a little bit differently than the LiPos. Like I said, you don’t have to balance them. You don’t have to really monitor that each individual cell, like you really should with a with a LiPo. But yeah, that’s I, I like them they’re, they’re simple to use and they’re pretty safe, comparatively speaking to it, to a LiPo. For sure, I’m not sure what the what the lifespan is on them because, honestly, I have not worn one out yet.

[00:59:01] Yeah, yeah, they will. They will sit in an airplane all winter long. I shouldn’t say that they will sit on my bench all winter long. Technically I do. I do leave them in the airplane, but I shouldn’t. Oh, but they’re stored inside, right? You’re right, I don’t keep them out in the garage or out in the shed or anything like that, so, but I don’t, I won’t touch them all winter long, and then, when I’m ready to go fly in the spring, I’ll go to top them off and they’ll take maybe, maybe 100, maybe 200 milliamps for them to get back to fully, fully charged. I mean, they really, really are.

[00:59:37] Are ideal for what I use them for: aircraft receiver batteries. And what do you say? The? The voltage was on them, I think. I think when they’re fully charged they go to 3.3 Or 3.6. I, to be honest, I don’t well wait a minute. I got a sheet right here: 3.6, Yeah, so per cell, and then never let them get below two and a half per cell. Oh okay, so they are a little bit.

[01:00:14] Different than LiPo, then just on their, on their voltages too, then right, okay, then that makes sense, like I’ve never used them. So that makes sense as to why you can kind of directly replace, right, like a six cell or a five cell receiver pack. Yeah, yeah, I love them, I really do.

[01:00:33] They’re kind of pricey still, I haven’t really been able to excuse me, I haven’t really been able to find a- I don’t want to say cheap, inexpensive. If you will place a value brand, if you will right, right. So I just buy them from fromico. I mean, that’s a good, it’s a quality brand, I’ll say their name, the great customer service. I highly recommend them. But anyway, I can’t find them really anywhere else for much cheaper anyway. So I just go ahead and get them from there and I’ve

[01:01:05] Like I said, I’ve got. Let’s see, I’ve got three in my big yak here. I’ve got two on the bench. One of them- it’s going to go in the Christen Eagle, but I’ve had these batteries. God, I can’t remember. I can’t even remember when I bought them. I need to do like what you do and put dates on them. In fact, I may do that on all these new LiPos I just got, but I actually think I might remember you talking about.

[01:01:27] Getting those I mean it’s been several years hasn’t it’s yeah it’s been at least if that’s the same.

[01:01:32] One I’m thinking of it’s been at least five years at least well you okay so I think you bought.

[01:01:39] Those about the same time I bought the batteries for my yak because in the in my plane.

[01:01:44] In that big one I put the two cell LiPos. Okay, yeah, so it probably yeah, because you’ve got a board in that in that airplane, right? Yep, so, okay, yeah, so, yep, yeah, that’s exactly when it was. So how long.

[01:01:57] Ago has that been I don’t know I don’t have those batteries in front of me to tell you the date on them.

[01:02:01] I mean it may not be the exact date but it’d be it’d be pretty close anyway I want to say probably.

[01:02:06] 15 Or 16. So yeah five or six years yeah well four or five or four or five yeah four or five.

[01:02:14] Years and, like I said, I pulled. I pulled them out of the yak. I mean, I pulled them out of the lat, out of the yak last fall, just last week, and topped them off and literally that one of them took like 120 milliamps to top off and the other one it was like about them, it’s like 200, it was like just shy of 200, I think. And how big are those? These are: this one is 4800. Oh, okay, 48, yeah.

[01:02:50] 4800 Milliamp pack and it sat idle. I mean, last time I charged it would probably have been last summer, honestly sometime, and I said all that time and that’s all it discharged. Yeah, it’s not bad then.

[01:03:04] That’s pretty impressive. You said those you said when charging. They don’t have, like the balance ports that LiPo does, so how do you charge those? Is there a special setting on a on your charger? Yeah, so in.

[01:03:14] Fact from fromico, the people that I buy these from they. They’re very, very good. They give you very, very specific instructions on how to charge them and basically, you charge them on your, on your LiPo charger, on the lithium polymer setting. Oh, I guess the voltage is close enough and you charge them as a two cell in series. I’m sorry. Yes, two cell in series or a 7.4 Volt, that’s how you charge them, even though they’re not. They’re not a LiPo and it’s using that. So

[01:03:44] They’re going for voltage then right yeah so and then just at one c like what amp do you do those with.

[01:03:52] One c. It says do not exceed one c. Okay, so 4.8, And I, I charge, yeah, I charge, I charge them at an amp. I mean I kind of I kind of undershoot a lot of these c ratings on the charge just because I like I’m cheap, I want to. I want my batteries to last as long as I can possibly make them and if charging at one c as opposed to three c or, or, I’m sorry, charging one amp as opposed to charging at 4.8 Amps, makes the battery last another season, I’m not in that big a.

[01:04:25] Hurry, I don’t need the battery charged that fast. So once yes is plenty for me. So I- or I’m sorry, one amp, I should say, I keep saying one c. So I just charge them at one amp. And to be honest, these little jst connectors, the little connectors that plug into your radio, with these small wire anything more than like an amp and a half or two amps, the wire gets kind of warm anyway and that kind of frightens me. So I just charge them at an amp, play it safe. Yeah, well, I think the jsts are.

[01:04:54] Supposed to be like five amps. That’s what they’ll handle. But I’ve seen, I’ve seen some of these little wires get pretty warm at an amp and a half. Well, like, I’m talking about the actual connector, not necessarily the. Oh yeah, I’m sorry. Yeah, I’m talking about the wire. Oh okay, huh, well, okay. So yeah, I love them. I guess, since we kind of got to charging, let’s, let’s move on to that really quick, okay, so nicad’s charge pretty easy. There’s no nothing special to do with those nickel metal.

[01:05:27] Hydride same thing charge pretty easy nothing special the one thing sure you have that delta.

[01:05:34] Peak detection set to be really sensitive for the nickel metal hydride right and so I would say most.

[01:05:40] If not all modern chargers have selectable battery types, like I know on mine. I can do like lead batteries, I can do the nickel cadmium batteries. I can do the nimh. I can do the LiPos. I think that’s all I have on mine. That’s the only ones I’ve ever used on it. Okay, that I remember saying at least so when you charge a LiPo, though, so that’s going to be completely different than any other battery really that we’ve dealt with. So yes, the long story short of it, LiPos have a balance lead.

[01:06:16] So what that does is actually hooks up wires to each and every cell individually. That’s in your battery. So if you have a 3s LiPo, you’re gonna have four wires coming off. That balance lead, one’s ground and then one’s positive for each of the three cells. When you first charge your LiPo you’re going to set your, your charge rate, like your amperage, and then you’re going to tell it what kind of, what size LiPo battery you have, like 2s, 3s- unless it’s smart enough to know on its own. Like I said,

[01:06:52] Mine isn’t. You have to tell it what you’re charging, so then it’s going to. Then it’s going to go ahead and check and make sure that pretty much what you’re or what you’re telling it is there is there. So it will check and make sure there’s voltage on all of the, all of the- the balance leads- and then it’s going to start charging. So your high rate of charge- like if you’re charging a 5000 mAh battery at 5 amps- your high rate of charge is going to actually start charging through the main connection to the battery when you get to the end. Let me back up just a little bit. So when you’re charging, there’s

[01:07:27] Two different charging profiles for LiPos. On mine you can either charge one or you can balance charge it. Always balance charge. It is what I will tell you. The reason for that. So when you’re charging your battery, you’re going to really quickly try and get that battery charged. What happens if you don’t balance it? When you get to 4.2 Volts on a cell for your LiPo battery that’s fully charged, you don’t want to put anything else in there. If you do, you’re going to start to kill that, that cell and

[01:08:00] It’s going to die off really quick when you’re charging three cell LiPos at your 11.1 Volts or 12.6 When it’s fully charged. When it gets to that 12.6 Volts, it doesn’t know what each cell is doing. So if one is it right, it’s just registering the pack volt, right, it’s just overall. You’re at 12.6 Volts, so one might be 4.2, One might be 4 volts and one might be 4.4 Volts. If that one is over, it’s your.

[01:08:31] Battery is going to be pretty much shot. So what happens is when you balance these things, when it gets towards the end it will start to charge each one of those cells separately and then that way it knows that each cell is going to be at 4.2 Volts and it will charge them on its own. So when one gets to the point where it’s fully charged, it stops charging and then it will charge the next one until it’s fully charged. So it’ll it’ll do them all at once. But when you get to the point to where each one is done and at 4.2 Volts, then your battery is fully charged. That is the best way to charge a.

[01:09:07] LiPo battery without killing it. Like I said, whenever I charge them I do one c, so I’ll do that at most one c, even if it can do more. So, like I said, five amps for a 5 000 milliamp hour battery and then when you get to the end it’s going to take a lot longer to charge. So you’re going to see that really go up and take the, take its charge quickly and then as it gets to the end it’s going to slow down a lot as it’s balancing because instead of that five amps it’s only putting like an amp or less or so, I think, into each one of those cells, just kind of bringing it up to its

[01:09:38] Full charge voltage. So just be careful when you’re doing that. That’s how really you’re going to make your, your batteries last longer, so that’s the best way to do it. You can also- you mentioned before- take your charger to the field with you. I like doing that too, especially when you’re flying a bunch of electric airplanes. I have a four port charger that I bring with me, so that will hook up to your car battery and then you can charge four separate batteries at once and

[01:10:10] Independent of each other, which is nice, yeah. Only problem with that- and I want to warn people on this because I’ve done it- if you’re at the field for a long time charging a bunch of batteries, your car battery is going to die and then you’re going to have to ask somebody for a jump. I’ve kind of gotten into the habit, when I’ve gone places like towards the end of the year last year, of bringing an extra like deep cycle battery with me and then just using that to charge. The chargers have a low voltage cutoff, so when it gets too low to safely charge your batteries, it’s not

[01:10:45] Going to, it’s not going to charge or it’s going to shut itself off, so you’re not charging batteries and then you don’t have to worry about having a dead car battery. So, yeah, always use a different battery. Is my recommendation, because I’ve been there to where I’ve had to get a jump. I’ve also been there to where I was the only person there and had to call somebody to come give me a jump, because, oh yeah, I’ve done it twice, once with somebody else there with me and then once by myself, and that’s not fun. That’s why I like nitro, that is true, but you, yeah, okay, you got me, that’s.

[01:11:20] True. No, I mean I’ve I’ve never, I’ve never ran my car battery down. But I mean I can see how that, how that could happen, especially if you’re flying, flying a lot, and you got a lot of.

[01:11:32] Batteries. Yeah, actually when I- when we used to run cars here quite a bit- I took one of our- our older kind of crappier golf carts and made a power panel on that to where I could actually charge all of the batteries and stuff straight off the golf cart, and then that the batteries in there are quite a bit bigger. Yeah, and the nice thing about that is I didn’t have to worry about having a car out in the field with me or anything like that, and I’ve also done that now with airplanes. Since I don’t do the cars as much, I’ll take that out with airplane batteries and

[01:12:04] Stuff and just kind of camp out in the field and go through a bunch of batteries and spend a couple hours out there at a time. So that’s fun too. Yeah, good times. Yep, okay, so I just wanted to. So the

[01:12:17] Algorithm that the chargers use for. I mean, I understand how it works with nycas and nicomotohydrates. What’s the difference between if you? If tell me and if you don’t, that’s fine, it’s not that big a deal. But is the algorithm different? Because there’s constant current, constant voltage, and then there’s variable current with. With constant, I mean there’s all these different charge algorithms. I mean, is it? Is it really that different between the

[01:12:51] Two styles of battery. Yeah, so with that I don’t know, okay, because I know with I have no idea. With nycads, I mean you talked about, you touched on it just a just a little bit ago, about how the peak voltage for, let’s say, a two cell LiPo is what? 8.4, I think that’s where it cut off. Yeah, it keeps it for two times two. Just while watching, watching my charger, while I’d be charging one of these batteries, the like you said, that the voltage, the, the pack voltage.

[01:13:25] Would get up to 8.4 Or whatever that top is very quickly, and then it would just stop there and then it would adjust the charge current to keep it at 8.4. So I’m I guess what I’m asking is: is the cutoff? When does it actually cut off the charge current, like when, when it takes?

[01:13:45] A tenth of a volt to keep it at 8.4. Oh, I see what you’re saying. Yeah, I, I’m asking, yeah, I, I do. I’ve noticed that before too. Yeah, like when I’m charging batteries, like it’ll start at that five amps and then yeah, it turns itself off and somehow it knows, based on voltage drop, pretty much how full it is. I see, I don’t know how it works. I’m not a an electrical engineer or anything, me either. But

[01:14:11] Yeah, I mean I know how they work with nycads and nuckle metal hydrides, I just didn’t know how it. I guess I just didn’t care enough. It was scared to find out. I guess because LiPo is still frighten me. I mean I still get nervous even just having them in the house sometimes when I think about especially this new battery I just bought. It’s. It’s like the biggest LiPo I’ve ever owned and just looking at it I’m intimidated by it. Yeah, that’s a little bigger than anything I’ve had too.

[01:14:37] But really it’s the same as your smaller ones. Just treat it well and it should. It should be fine if you see it start to get puffy. Don’t use it. Well, hopefully it doesn’t do that for a while.

[01:14:48] Because it wasn’t- I mean, relatively speaking, it wasn’t- a cheap battery. Well, and you should get a lot of uses out of it as long as you take care of it right. Well, now I’ll take your advice and I’ll not over discharge it or discharge it, overcharge it. I guess I should say also: yeah, what, like? What connectors do you use on those? Yeah, so I use dean’s two pin or dean’s ultra plugs on pretty much everything that’s not a jst connector. So, and the reason is because- and I’m set in my ways-

[01:15:23] I used these style of connectors way back when I used to race rc cars and they’re- they’re- I don’t know what they’re actually. I think they’re capable of like 120 amps or 150 amps, or they’re capable of quite a bit of current, and I have I have never knock on wood. I’ve never gotten one so hot that I’ve knocked a solder joint or anything off of them. So is that like a bigger version of dean’s then, or no? The dean’s ultra plug is so dean’s like over the years. I’ll just give you a quick.

[01:15:57] Brief history. So dean’s has been making plugs for a very, very long ws. Dean’s- that’s the name of the company making plugs- for a really long time and they actually started their business making.

[01:16:09] Connectors for radios, like servo connectors and things like that. They were little three pin and they made these little, tiny, little two pin connectors and they’re red and you could get them in black too and they’re just very high quality. The pins are all gold plated, so good for conductivity. And then they made these- I forget this. I think it was in the early 90s. They may produce a plug called the ultra plug and it was just a. It was just a heavier duty version of their two pin plug that they were making at the time and they’re arranged such that one pin

[01:16:44] Is arranged one way and then the other pin is arranged 90 degrees to that, so it’s impossible to plug them in backwards. Now, it’s not impossible to solder them backwards, yeah, but when you have them all soldered correctly and they’re cool because on the back side of the plug they have a plus and a minus so you can be consistent about your, your setup. But anyway, I’ve used them ever since I’ve done cars and I know there’s better connectors on the market now, probably, and certainly there’s cheaper.

[01:17:15] Connectors on the market, but I like these. Hobby king even sells a version of it- I think it’s called the xt something or other- and they’re compatible with the dean’s plug, so that’s what I use.

[01:17:30] Hmm well I guess I don’t know about the dean’s ultra plug is what you said it was I’ll have to look.

[01:17:35] That up. That’s what. That’s what dean’s called them. They called them their ultra plug, but it’s the same connector. You’ve seen them, I mean they’ve. They’ve been on all my batteries since you’ve known me well.

[01:17:45] But okay so I what confuses me so a regular dean’s plug that I know is 50 amps so is there a difference.

[01:17:55] Between a dean’s plug and a dean’s ultra plug. Well, I don’t think so. I think you and I are talking about the same plug, but I thought they were capable of much more than that. I could be wrong, but no so.

[01:18:07] If, if, if we’re talking about the same thing- little red ones, because I have some of those too- that’s 50 amp. Oh okay, and it’s funny you like that because I don’t like those. My reason for not liking it was I. When you solder them, you have to be very careful. What I found is that the best thing to do when you’re soldering them is to have a heat sink on the other side to kind of take some of that heat away, because it, the red plastic, melts just a little bit if it gets too hot, and then they

[01:18:38] Are very difficult to plug in and unplug to the other ones you need a hotter iron then because I have.

[01:18:47] Zero problems with that when I’m soldering them oh really well yeah I’ve had problems with that.

[01:18:51] Before, but the ones I’ve used pretty much on just about everything now are the xt60s, and those are 60 amps. What I like most about those, especially compared to dean’s, they plug in and unplug very easily. It’s it’s the same thing to where you can’t get it backwards when you’re plugging them in. Obviously, watch there’s plus and minus on it when you’re when you’re putting it together or when you’re soldering it up. But it also it has the round connector inside.

[01:19:21] Like the bullet style and it just makes it so much easier to solder. You’re not trying to solder onto a little flat piece of metal like you are on the dean’s, so that’s that’s probably my favorite one. They do make like the xt90. That’s going to be a little bit bigger and that’ll handle, as the name suggests, 90 amps. But yeah, the, the xt60s are what I use. Okay, I had some yellow ones. Right, yeah, those are the yellow ones. I had some of the, the, the blue ones, the, what?

[01:19:54] What’s it called the ec3s from e-flight? Yeah, you can that, not just on them, you can get those on other things too. I think one of the cars I had a lot a long time ago had those on it. Man, I don’t like those very much, I know, I’m sure. I’m sure some people really do. They don’t seem to come apart as easy and together as like the xt60s. The thing that is nice about them, though.

[01:20:25] Is that you solder them when they’re not in the plastic. So you assemble that afterwards. You solder your bullet connector and then you push it into the plastic piece and it clips in right. So that’s kind of nice. With the deans and with the xt60s you have to use the shrink tubing behind it just to make sure you don’t get a short. So always use the shrink tubing on those. I’m trying to think what are some of the other ones there’s? Oh, I had some, I think.

[01:20:57] I had one battery in a an airplane and I ended up changing it out, but it was a hxt, I think is what they’re called. It was like a four, four millimeter bullet connection. Okay, that’s kind of the same thing. When you assemble, those is the ec3s, I just, but I to me they’re. They’re hard to plug and unplug. I don’t like those very much either and they’re really long, so it takes up a lot more.

[01:21:23] Space oh I know yeah I know the ones you’re talking about they’re red I think yeah I don’t like.

[01:21:28] Those either. They are really long, yeah, but yeah, I mean other than that, like your, your balance connector, I think those are the. What are they called? The jst dash xh? I think, yeah, I think yeah.

[01:21:41] I think there’s three different styles of those jsts but yeah that’s but yeah that’s the most common.

[01:21:47] One that I, if I remember right, and I think those are only a couple amps. You can’t put a lot of power through them. So, yeah, that’s why, like I said, my favorite ones are the xt60s. Pretty much everything I have is either xt60 or dean’s. Yeah, I think I’ve switched everything else out. That wasn’t that to be that, and it’s nice to do it that way too, because then you don’t have a whole bunch of different charging leads for your chargers, you can just have a single one. That’s.

[01:22:16] Yeah, and that, and that’s probably why I still use the dean’s, because all of my charge, like everything I have, is as these dean’s. And I mean even if I, even if I wanted to change to an xt60 or 90, I’d have to buy that for everything I own and it’s just, I don’t know, just easier to keep using what I have.

[01:22:36] Yeah it is I mean as long as they’re not giving you problems there’s no need to reinvent the wheel.

[01:22:41] So no, and you mentioned about when you- I mean I don’t want to get into soldering techniques or anything like that, but you, you talked about using a heatsink and really, when you’re soldering connectors onto a battery, on a LiPo battery especially, you should be using a wet, a wet paper towel or a rag or something on those wires away from that solder joint anyway, because you don’t want any of that heat getting into the cells of the battery. Yeah, that’s a good point. So what, when you solder, what do you set your iron in? As hot as it’ll go? I’m using a. It’s an old hacko, h-a-k-o, I think.

[01:23:15] And I believe it is a 120 watt. I think I’d have to get the box out, but anyway I set it to the max because I don’t want like and I don’t use flux either. I use a good quality solder -huh that I get from same company, ws dean’s people, same people who make my plugs, or make the plugs that I use, and I’ll- I’ll pretend, if you will, I’ll- get some solder on the tabs of.

[01:23:47] The connector first. Yeah, before I go and try to, because that is a lot easier to get that soft and sticky if you will yep than it. Then it is to get the gold on the player on the on the connector. But anyway, I don’t want to be on that tab very long at all with the iron because I don’t, I don’t want to melt the plug like the problems you say you’ve ran into. So a good, good, good quality, hot, like a really hot iron with a big fat tip that will transfer as much heat quickly as and rapidly as you can is better than an.

[01:24:24] Iron with a smaller tip, that maybe you have to sit there on the tab and wait for everything to get hot, because then you’re going to run the risk of getting heat down the wire, into the battery or melting the plug. Yeah, I just hotter is better. Yeah, I think I set mine like 800 degrees, if I

[01:24:40] Remember, that’s what it does, because I do the same thing. I just turn it all the way up when I’m soldering these things, yeah, and then I use one of those little helping hands things, the thing that has a couple alligator clips and man, that makes it so much easier. Yeah, I’ve got a cool.

[01:24:54] Little tool here that I used to use in the in the rc car business is a aluminum block that actually- sorry, actually clamps the connector into it. So then you have another free hand to manipulate the wire and hold it still, and you still have to use fingers, and that’s probably why I don’t have any nerve endings left in the tips of my first three fingers on both hands. But anyway, that’s what that’s the setup I use. At least it’s not your thumb that you use for flying.

[01:25:27] True, I would adapt. I would adapt and overcome. Maybe you’d go with the, the pinch, instead of the thumb thing. I’ll say it again: I, I really wish I had learned to fly that way. I really do, but I, I’ve tried it and it’s just so weird to me. I, I can’t like, I’m just a thumb kind.

[01:25:46] Of a guy. I have no precision. Yeah, I guess I lucked out into the fact that when I started I don’t remember who it was, but somebody told me the pinch. I mean, they didn’t actually tell me, but when they showed me how to hold it, that’s how they showed me and that’s that’s just kind of how I- how I’ve taken off since then. Taken off, yeah, that’s kind of how I’ve done it since then. I see what you did there. Yeah, that was not on purpose. It’s getting late actually. I think it’s probably about time to end this one. Okay, it’s a lot longer, a lot longer than I planned on. So anything else you want to add, or?

[01:26:16] Are we just going to call it quits no I don’t I think I think you hit all the high points.

[01:26:21] All right well in that case goodbye I’m Ron and I’m john see you later we hope you enjoyed this.

[01:26:29] Episode of the RC Plane Lab podcast. For topic suggestions, to ask questions or to give any feedback, connect with us at rcplanelab.com or email us direct at either Ron at rcplanelab.com or Tom at rcplanelab.com. You can also text us or leave us a voicemail at 818-351-9846. Please subscribe, rate and review us on your favorite podcast app until next time. May your landings be gentle.