For Bashers, By Bashers!

Charger Shootout – Speed, Mah Cutoff

Speed and Mah Cutoff
An important category for a lot of people is speed. How fast does it take to charge my pack? Some of the chargers have a ‘fast charge’ mode. This mode sacrifices accuracy and balancing, and just tries to get the pack charged fast. We decided not to use this mode because most people want their packs fully charged.
Before every charge, each pack was discharged to 3.2v per cell. This is the ‘going rate’ most people like to safely use while discharging LiPo’s. After each charge, the packs were discharged again to 3.2v and the mah each pack had stored/used during the discharge was recorded. In the end, all the pack mah’s were fairly close.

Checkpoint LiPo Battery For all testing we used the Team Checkpoint 2S 5000mah LiPo Battery that we used during the Lipo Battery Shootout 2 because we knew it had been broken in, and we knew what to expect out of the mah ratings at this point.

*It should be noted that during this test we had some issues with using the Venom charger. The first time we charged our 5000mah pack, the Venom charger stopped when it thought it put in 5000mah, which was the capacity we had it set to. Upon discharging the pack, it only put out 3796mah. That seemed odd, maybe we screwed something up, so we tried again. Again, same results, the charger thought it put in 5000mah, the battery discharged to 3780. Hmm. So this time we set the capacity setting to 6000mah. The charger thought it charged to 6000mah (ack!), but it really only had 4543mah. Finally we shut off the capacity cut off in the menu. The charger thought it charged the pack to 6162mah, and ended up with 4685 mah. Venom has been contacted about this issue, and we will hopefully bring you an update. For all those Venom owners, you may want to test your packs after a charge, and see if you may be coming up short in the mah area.

PointsManufacturer/ChargerTimemah
1FMA CellPro 10S60min4623 mah
2Hyperion 720i61.51min4609 mah
3Hyperion 615i Duo62.26min4620 mah
4Duratrax Onyx 22072.12min4687 mah
5Venom Pro Plus82.19min4685 mah*
6Team Checkpoint TC103097min4637 mah

While we love the Checkpoint around here, it is really slow. The bulk of the charge is done fairly quickly, but the last few amps drag on forever as the charger winds down. Many people just cancel the charge once it gets close to finished and save about 10 minutes.

On to Multi Pack Charging! Click HERE.

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