[NSRCA-discussion] LiPo balancing

[Chad Northeast]

I am pretty sure most of the balancers are of the current bleed type.  I know TP is, FP appears to be as does Hyperion and a few others.  These are the kind that get hot :)

Schulze's new charger  (NEXT is the brand), is of the type that moves current from the high cells to the low cells, so its a bit more efficient during the charge.  I should have one of these to use this year from Schulze quite soon.

To me the balancers of today are more of a safety device than a pack maintenance device.  Until your pack is really old and worn out I think the balancers are not accurate enough to provide good cell voltage control and the bleed type cannot keep up to a charger anyway.  They are really good safety devices when connected to a charger which terminates the charge when the balancer sees any sort of problem with the pack.

They all seem to work ok to one degree or another.  I have hopes that the new Schulze charger/integrated balancer will work better than the rest, but at $600 US its twice the list cost of a TP 1010/210 charger balancer package.  I can't say I have been overly impressed with the precision of the TP system, but its charged my batteries probably in the 1000's of times quite reliably, so maybe I should be happy LOL!

Chad

----- Original Message -----
From: John Konneker <jlkonn at hotmail.com>
Date: Wednesday, March 12, 2008 3:04 pm
Subject: [NSRCA-discussion] LiPo balancing
To: Discussion List <nsrca-discussion at lists.nsrca.org>

> 
> I am under the impression that there are a couple different 
> balance charger schemes.  I'm going to guess one is to 
> "balance up".  That is to keep switching to the low cell 
> and kind of leap frog to full charge.  The other would be 
> the discharging type balancers that you simply plug in a fully 
> charged LiPo in and it discharges the high cell down to match 
> the other cell.  Then is there a third type that someone 
> lowers the high cell while charging?  I don't know any of 
> this and am only guessing.  The reason I ask is I have two 
> charges that balance.  One does a really good job and the 
> other not as well.  I guess what I'm saying is I need a 
> lesson in how this stuff works.
> Thanks!
> JLK
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