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 :)<br><br>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.<br><br>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.<br><br>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!<br><br>Chad<br><br>----- Original Message -----<br>From: John Konneker <jlkonn@hotmail.com><br>Date: Wednesday, March 12, 2008 3:04 pm<br>Subject: [NSRCA-discussion] LiPo balancing<br>To: Discussion List <nsrca-discussion@lists.nsrca.org><br><br>> <br>> I am under the impression that there are a couple different <br>> balance charger schemes. I'm going to guess one is to <br>> "balance up". That is to keep switching to the low cell <br>> and kind of leap frog to full charge. The other would be <br>> the discharging type balancers that you simply plug in a fully <br>> charged LiPo in and it discharges the high cell down to match <br>> the other cell. Then is there a third type that someone <br>> lowers the high cell while charging? I don't know any of <br>> this and am only guessing. The reason I ask is I have two <br>> charges that balance. One does a really good job and the <br>> other not as well. I guess what I'm saying is I need a <br>> lesson in how this stuff works.<br>> Thanks!<br>> JLK