nrgwise
First Officer
United States
Offline
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Working as an engineer in the capacitor/battery/voltage storage industry, I can offer this and you can take it for whatever you feel it is worth:
Many of us like to use chargers designed to get the most charge to the cells as fast as possible, hence quick charging. Yes, it is advantageous as far as time delay, but the worst thing you can do to your batteries. With rapid chargers (and DJI's 100W charger qualifies considering how 'rapidly' it charges the battery) they are designed to detect a current level based on a minimal voltage. It is possible to achieve this 'peak' level and shut the charger off - stop charging - when the battery is not actually fully charged. What I mean by this is this: fully charged by one charger (a rapid charger) is not a fully charged battery (actual battery capacity). To get the full potential of your batteries, the longest life, the longest flight times, slow charge the batteries. Yes, it takes longer and you need to do some planning ahead, but a slow charge will give your battery much better 'charge saturation' throughout all cells.
I have a P2V+ and two P3P's, (I am not a commercial so I will not give a free plug) and I have a dedicated charger for both types of batteries. I admit, these were not exactly cheap (and in fact, the P2 version is on closeout sale right now) but they provide an excellent fully saturated charge of the battery and also offer a 'deep cycle' discharge function that works great. I posted a long, detailed post on the P2 forums a while ago, but it can be boiled down to this: I have 5 batteries for the P2 and 5 for the P3. The chargers I am referring to will charge 4 batteries at a time (and the RC/RC-extender at the same time). So with the P2 I had one battery that had NEVER been charged on anything other than the standard DJI charger for the P2+ (not technically a rapid charger IMO). I log every flight - time, location, battery used, weather info, among other things. What I noticed very quickly was that the batteries that were charged in the slow charger consistently gave 3 to 6 minutes LONGER flight time than the one that was not in the slow charger. But I knew this was already going to be the case. This does not mean that the DJI charger is not good. It just means that it does not offer the optimal charge for the batteries and is exactly what I expected.
Now for the P3 batteries...I do not have as many flights on them as I do with the P2, but the data I am recording seems to show the same trend as I would expect: the slower the charge, the better the saturation. And saturation is what you want for the best performance. This is not from a quad pilot's point of view, this is from an engineer's point of view. It just happens that as quad pilot I can benefit from this knowledge.
So even if the charger costs, let us say 500.00, and you have 4 batteries that cost on average 130.00 each, you are talking more for batteries than for charger. Now let us say that due to using the charger your batteries last twice as long as your friend's batteries who did not use the charger so in X amount of time your friend has spent 130 x 8 (1040.00) for batteries while you have spent 130 x 4 + 500 (1020.00) so for the first battery cycle you got twice as much time at a savings of 20.00 with half the batteries. However, the second battery cycle you will save the entire cost of the charger.
My original P2V+ batteries, all bought at the same time, each with over 100 flights, ALL report over 95% health. EXCEPT for the one not 'slow charged.' It reports 79% health.
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