 What's up guys welcome to Rotor Riot and welcome back to Learn to FPV. Today we're going to be talking about charging. How to charge your batteries, how to use the different types of chargers that are out there, and how to do it safely. The concepts and the actual process of charging batteries is very simple but the potential for fire from these things is very real so you need to take it serious. There's only a few different things that you need to get right and you'll never have a problem but it only takes one time to overlook something do something wrong or be negligent and your house could be gone. There's been people in this hobby that are very prominent been doing it a long time and they know what they're doing but one day they decided just to like slack off not really pay attention not be around do something wrong and they've had fire so it's very important to be safe with batteries. So a few things to know about batteries themselves. A couple terms you're gonna see is C. You'll see a C rating a charge rating and that's also going to be in C. What C means is capacity so the C is stands for the capacity of the battery. The way that the batteries are rated is in milliamps so this is a 1000 milliamp battery. It takes 1000 milliamps to get to one amp so if someone says charge that battery at one C for a 1000 milliamp battery that means charge it at one amps. This one over here is a 1500 milliamp battery so again very simple you take the 1500 you move the decimal 1.5 amps is a one C charge rating. Don't confuse the charge rating with the discharge rating so on this one it says 120 C don't charge this at 120 amps that's not how that works. That rating is the discharge rating so it's saying that this battery is capable of pushing out 120 times its capacity so 1.5 times 120 I'm not a math whiz you guys do the math on that. Some batteries will have on it what the recommended charge rate is some won't. The basic gist of that is if you're not in a rush you're not going to fly right now charge your batteries at one C so take the capacity of the battery move the decimal over charge it at that rate so for this 1000 milliamp battery charge it at one amp for the 1500 1.5. At a one C charge rate it's typically gonna take about 30 to 40 minutes to charge that battery. If you need to get your battery charge a little bit faster you can go up to two or three C charge rate. I would say a three C charge rate is pretty much the standard like this is a quicker charge rate that's still safe. Charging your batteries at a really high amperage rate is not the thing that's going to catch a fire. It could maybe I've never seen it happen there's usually other factors that cause the battery to go up in flames. The thing you really need to worry about is if you are impatient and you're charging your batteries really fast that's usually just going to degrade the battery and you're going to get less cycles out of the battery and if you're one to fly a lot and you have you know 10 or 15 batteries it gets really expensive so it's smart to take care of your batteries make them last and get hundreds of uses out of them. Another thing about the batteries you need to understand is the S so S stands for series this is a 6S battery that means inside of this one battery there's actually six individual cells and those cells are run in series so also to avoid confusion it's S because it stands for series and because C is already used for capacity so instead of being six cells it's six cells in series. This one's a four cell battery or 4S battery that's important because that's you're going to have to match that setting in the charger and it's also going to determine what charger you need. Most drones are going to run anywhere from a one to six S battery and most chargers can do those ranges but who knows maybe you have something that runs on an 8S battery and the charger doesn't support it it only goes up to 6S so in that case you need to look for a charger that can handle up to 8S. Okay let's do a little quick look or review on the different types of chargers so you're going to see a lot of different chargers out there that look very similar to this. This is what's commonly referred to as the four button charger because there's a ton of them out there but they all have these four buttons they all work really similar. I'm going to show you exactly what they do in a little bit and the other thing to take a look at on the charger is what kind of connections does it have so what kind of connection does it have to power it from the wall and what kind of connection does it have going from the charger to your battery so both of these two on the left they're going to use what's called a banana plug so it's this type of connection these are going to plug into here you match up the colors that's the connection but these ISDT chargers and I'm sure some other ones work like this they have XT60 connectors on both sides so that's the same type of connector that typically comes on the battery so it's just important to know that when you're buying a charger what type of connectors you're going to need and if you can look at the product page and try to figure out what it's going to come with because some chargers will come with the exact connectors you need you can take it out plug in your batteries and start charging other times you might need to make one or buy one that's going to work for you. The other thing to know is whether it's AC or DC charger so this charger it's AC charger that means that you can plug the power cord straight into this and plug it into a wall and this one is like one of those computer type power cords this one is going to take an adapter and have like a barrel plug so it's just good to know over here we have a DC charger so this thing is doesn't have a power supply built into it it has a XT60 plug so you need some sort of power supply this is my power supply this actually comes from a server and that I just buy this off eBay there's a little bit of modification you have to do put XT60 on it you can power that we also have this guy in the store this makes it a little bit easier there's no modification you need to do you just screw on these terminals to get your power cable set up you screw down your XT60 and boom you're you're in the game hook this up to this you got power okay so let me talk about some of the things that could go wrong first one I would say if you do have a charger that has these type of banana jacks on them you need to understand that if you have your battery connected to one side and you touch the other side that's going to short out the battery so it could cause sparks it could cause fire it could blow up the battery it's just not good so if you have this thing plugged into the charger with your battery don't unplug that from the charger make sure you take the battery and unplug that first before this because again you don't want those touching another huge thing that you have to get correct which I'll show you when I show you how to use the charger is you need to set it to the right type of chemistry not all batteries work exactly the same so a lithium polymer battery it's pretty much dead at 3.7 volts per cell so again there's six cells in here each and every one of them is going to be at 3.7 when it's dead when it's fully charged each of those cells is going to be 4.2 volts now there's different types of battery chemistries and they're not they don't all match those numbers so sometimes their full voltage could be higher so if you tried to charge this thing on a different chemistry there's a chance that it's not going to stop when it needs to at 4.2 volts per cell it's going to keep going and that's when it gets really ugly the battery will swell up it's going to get really ugly and then it's going to just burst into flames and I've had one of those situations and the flames were up to the ceiling it wasn't fun and what happened to me was is the next tip I wasn't balance charging you want to always balance charge the battery that's what these wires here are for so each of these wires is going to run into each of the individual cells and by balancing it it's making sure that each cell has an equal voltage to each other you don't want your batteries to be out of balance and you don't want to charge them without a balance lead because in my case what had happened was the balance leads were chopped off and I had been charging it just you know regular charge no balance for a while and getting away with it it was okay but then at some point one of those cells in the battery it died it quit it stopped being able to take a charge since I didn't have the balance plug plugged in the charger didn't know that that one cell wasn't taking a charge it was just going until it saw the voltage that a full battery should have so what that means is this one wasn't taking a charge the rest of them were getting overcharged to compensate for that so pretty ugly incident luckily no one was hurt luckily I didn't burn the whole building down but I definitely learned never charge without balance charging always balance charge every single time aside from that things can just happen like it might not make any sense that you might have had a fire and not even know exactly what went wrong and in my case when I did have a fire had I just been right next to it it would have never happened I could have reached over and had stopped I could have unplugged it got the battery to a safe place so my last safety tip is just never assume that everything is going to go fine definitely stay within a close proximity and every couple minutes take a look maybe touch the battery make sure everything's fine don't leave your batteries charging unattended definitely don't set up a whole bunch of batteries charging and go to bed that's a terrible idea because you could wake up with a house full of smoke or you could just never wake up again I mean I don't want to be a little scary here but this is to be taken seriously do not sleep or just leave your house with your batteries charged it's not worth it just wait till you have the time and monitor them while you're charging so that's generally it that's all you really need to look out for to make sure that you're going to have safe charging so monitor your batteries check the balance plug from time to time make sure each cell is you know pretty on par with each other if you have a battery that's going out of balance from cell to cell really take your time charge it really slow and really watch it always make sure that your charger is set up to the right setting so you're not going to overcharge that battery and just always always always stay within a proximity while you're charging keep an eye on it don't don't just walk away while you're charging okay with that I'm going to go into this charger and walk you through the menus and just show you the basics of how to get charging let's go ahead and plug in the cables that we're going to need almost every four button charger will have banana jack inputs depending on the one you buy or what type of battery that you're actually using it may or may not come with the right connector on the other end so this one I actually made the way to plug it in is very simple this match up the colors black to black red to red you're also going to need a balance plug this charger actually comes with a little board that's going to have one slot for each different cell battery two through six cell but I'm not really sure where that's at and this will work too so you can just either plug this straight in or sometimes like I said it'll come with that board you'll plug that in plug your battery into that but either way you need a balance plug that in so once again main battery connector balance very important to balance always balance so I'm gonna go ahead and plug the battery in we're gonna be charging a six cell battery here today now first thing you need to do is make sure that you are on the right chemistry of battery so already it's on the correct one lipo but just to show you the other options there's lilo life lihv this is for nickel metal hydride batteries nycad and lead acid I'm not even sure what that does we don't need that we don't need that don't need that so lipo battery that's the correct one this is actually really important probably the most important setting of the whole charger because different batteries are gonna have a different end voltage so if you were to set this up for nickel metal hydride it's not going to stop when this battery is actually full because it's expecting to run it to a higher voltage so you it's really important make sure you're picking lipo and go ahead and hit start now here if we cycle through these are the different types of charging and discharging modes it's already on the one we want we want balance charge but just to show you what else you can do your storage so a storage charge will be wherever the battery is at it's gonna set each cell in the battery to 3.8 volts per cell that's the nominal voltage that batteries like to rest at there's discharge so this would be likes for a bad battery that you want to get rid of you can set the voltage that you want to discharge it down to and just get all the juice out of it charge I would only use for a one cell because you could charge a battery without balancing it but that's another way to get a fire because if one of these cells is not accepting a charge it's just gonna keep charging the other cells until it sees the voltage it wants but that's just gonna overcharge them it's gonna swell up it's gonna burst in your flames so always balance charge balance charge is what we want now it's set up for 4s that means four cells in series this is a 6s battery this is an important setting to set up correctly but most chargers you're gonna come across they're gonna have safety features built in so even though these don't match if I were to try to start it it's telling me the voltage is too high so it won't let me mess that up anyways but let's we have to actually set that up correct so the start button see how it's flashing we'll change that to 6s go ahead and hit start now the C is again for capacity and this isn't really necessary but this is just giving you that one C charge rate so I actually have a 1000 milliamp battery so if I change that to 1000 it's automatically giving me a one amp charge so that's my one C charge rating so from there everything is set up correct I can just hold the start button hit one one more time to confirm and it's charging it's very simple again just stay near it make sure everything's fine maybe touch it every now and then make sure it's not getting warm or anything which it really shouldn't and that's the basics of how to use a four button charger again like I was talking about if I wanted to charge this battery a little faster I would hit this until it goes into the amps maybe increase that to like three to four amps another thing about the C rating and the charge when it says a three C charge rate it's not necessary to be like exactly three so I don't have to go just to three amps if it was 3.3 not a big deal that doesn't really matter so hold start confirm and it's charged okay that was the four button charger it's very simple let's move on to the one I actually use the ISDT T8 okay so here I have my ISDT charger set up it's gonna do basically everything the same as what the other charger did it's just laid out a little bit different overall in my opinion I would say it's a little bit easier to use so the main difference you'll notice as it does not take these banana type jacks it actually has an XT60 connector built into it so assuming you're using XT60s on your batteries you can actually just plug the battery directly into the charger now for the balance leads you'll notice that there's some notches those are going to correspond with the notches on the balance of your battery so you want those facing down and you want to start at the left so there's also a little icon here that kind of lets you know this is the side you need to start on so all the way to the left with the tabs facing down as soon as I plug that in you're gonna notice it reads out the voltage of each individual cell automatically I really like that so on this charger you're gonna press the middle button to get into the menu and this is basically everything you would need to set up one of the cool things that makes it a little bit faster a little bit easier to use is the ISDT chargers will automatically detect how many cells of a battery you're using so if I were to plug in a 6s that's just gonna jump up to 6 to whichever one so that's one less thing to worry about and if you did have it set up wrong it's just like the other charger there's safety field features built in it's not gonna let you charge it wrong so your battery type is up at the top just like the other one there's different types and this is super important make sure you get this right make sure it's on lipo if you're charging a lipo on this charger you can also change at which at which voltage is done I recommend just keep that on 4.2 that's why there's a thumbs up there because that's really what it should be if you want to get risky you can push it a little over but I would definitely recommend just keep it at 4.2 and then here's the current that you're gonna charge at so I think it goes this charger goes all the way up to 30 amps I wouldn't recommend doing that on just one battery let's again let's keep it to our around 3c or in fact I'm in no rush so we could just charge it 1c 1c and a 1500 milliamp battery is 1.5 amps fast for me 1.5 enter go down to start it's very simple now it's charging and again I'll say it again don't leave and just trust that this is just gonna be fine it probably will but if it's not you're gonna have a mess to come back to you so keep an eye on it until it's done okay so the last thing we're gonna talk about is parallel charging what parallel charging is is charging more than one battery at once so if you remember I said a 1c charger it's gonna take about a half hour to 40 minutes so if you have 10 batteries you might not want to wait five hours to charge all those batteries so a way to get those batteries charge a little bit quicker is through parallel charging you're almost always going to see parallel boards I don't have one of those but we'll put a picture right here but what I prefer to use is these parallel cables simply because they're more flexible it's a lot easier to get a bunch of batteries plugged into this whereas if you have a parallel board it's gonna be a small board you need to get all your batteries kind of in a tight space but there's pros and cons to that too so the parallel cable it's very easy to use it's more flexible but parallel boards a they have balanced ports for two through six s batteries so for me my parallel balance cable this is only for four cell so if I want to charge that six cell I have to have a separate one of these for that and be there's a lot of parallel boards out there that have a little more protection they have fuses in them so current spikes up and something's going wrong the fuse will blow and it'll just stop taking in that current so the way that parallel charging works basically these two wires are split off into all these wires so when I have six batteries plugged into those it essentially becomes one big battery that's how the charger sees it it's just like taking all those batteries and actually making them one and plugging that in so now when we were talking about our one C or two C or three C charge rate the way to factor that is you just add the batteries together so this is a 1000 milliamp battery once one C charge rate is one amps if I have six of them plugged together my one C charge rate becomes six amps the basic difference between parallel and series parallel adds your capacity together series adds your voltage together parallel charging also comes with its own sort of danger the main thing that will instantly cause a fire is when you hook up batteries in parallel you cannot mix voltages or different cell counts of batteries if I were to plug in a six cell and a four cell together it's not an even amount of power so what's going to happen is the current from this batteries going to flow into this battery really fast and it's going to cause this one to blow up so you cannot mix if you're going to charge six cell batteries in parallel you can only be using six cell four cell batteries in parallel only four cell that was my other lipo fire I've had I've had two one was because I wasn't balance charging and one was because I had a parallel board with a six-ass battery plugged into it and I just I don't know I didn't notice it I wasn't paying attention I took a three cell and I plugged it in and pretty much immediately it just went and went up in flames so number one thing with parallel charging is you cannot mix voltages or different cell batteries number two is you should generally have the batteries pretty close to the same voltage I don't think this one is as important you're going to see a lot of people tell you that they will only parallel charge batteries if every cell is exactly the same on every battery the main problem here's what's happening so like I said when you connect all your batteries together in parallel it pretty much sees it as one battery the analogy I like to make to people it's like having six buckets but each of those buckets is connected at the bottom of hoses so even if they weren't exactly the same every cell it's just like filling up those six buckets by filling up one on one side over time they're all going to be at the same level so it's basically the same exact thing is going to happen with batteries if you have one that's at 3.9 on every cell and you have one that's at like 3.6 if you connect them together and let it sit they're both going to be right about in the middle at like 3.7 the problem though is especially more on balance boards the balance cables can probably handle a little bit better once you plug in these balance leads you're now connecting the two batteries and current is like water it's going to flow and it's going to take the less least resistance so sometimes what could happen is if you were to have a balance board and you plug two balance leads in there are way off on voltage that current's going to rush from the higher charged battery to the lower one and it could blow up your balance board if the traces on that circuit board are not rated to take that much current flowing through you could probably get away with a little bit more on this because the wire is probably rated for a little bit higher but in general just keep them relatively close to each other don't i mean you wouldn't there's no reason to have a fully charged battery and a fully dead battery together anyways because the fully charged one doesn't need to be charged but that's the main thing you want to stay away from don't don't have one that's almost charged and one that's really low mixed together like i showed you on the isd t charger the cool thing is as soon as you plug this in you can see what the voltage of each cell in the battery is so when i'm going to parallel charge and i have a whole bunch of batteries laid out on the table i just take them one at a time i plug them in i see what the voltage is if one's an outlier and it's way different i'll just kind of set that one to the side if i find another one that's similar to that voltage i'll add it to that pile and i'll charge those together later so that's going to do it for charging i hope you guys learned something i hope you guys are going to be safe out there i don't want to hear about anybody having any fires that's definitely not a fun thing to have happen to you so be safe take it easy don't charge at a really high rate unless you're really in a rush and if you're in a rush don't push it too hard it's not good for the batteries and it's it's just a little more risky so thanks for watching and this is Learn FPV