Life of a lipo

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Sean is right if I am gonna run in a week or so..fully charged is all good. Anything more then that..I will storage charge. I see on average about 2 to 2.5 years on before they go. I have two SMC 3s packs about at 3 years. They are hard packs that are swelling in their cases and are dropping voltage quick under load. But they have lasted 3 years under aggressive driving running them in 6s rigs. Anything over 2 years now a days I am happy with...though since I got my brap rig...don't really drive my 6s e rigs hardly ever.
 
I have some floureon 2S lipo's that are 2 maybe 3 years old now that perform perfectly well, hold charge, drain and charge balanced.
But for the price of them Doug if you think you have one that's past its best toss it and buy another.
The little 2200mah 2S lipo's I run in my truck are approx £13 each from Ebay, I have a pair of them, 1 battery will last me at least 4 tanks at the track.
 
Axelay2003 said:
I’m new here. Can you run the Lipos down to the bare minimum and then store them?
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No this will ruin the lipo and makes them unstable. Do not do this. Ensure you have a low voltage cut off set up or if you don't have that option, run a Lipo alarm. Nimh batteries can and should be fully drained, but never with Lipos.
 
RickDizzle said:
No this will ruin the lipo and makes them unstable. Do not do this. Ensure you have a low voltage cut off set up or if you don't have that option, run a Lipo alarm. Nimh batteries can and should be fully drained, but never with Lipos.
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Is the cutoff usually at 3.3V? I have a venom alarm that I attach to t the lipos. When it reaches that, is it safe to store them?
 
They can safely go to 3.1v, the limit when you start causing damage is 3v per cell. On my crawlers I have them set to 3.2v per cell to give maximum run time.
 
I personally store at 3.8. Just my weird OCD as I have always done that w all my lipos. And yeah 3.3 is safe minimum for discharge stop voltage...but I would use your charger when done, select storage and charge it under that setting. Will get it to 3.8 for ya.
 
3.7-3.8 is standard storage voltage. That's why lipo that you buy will arrive at that voltage. That is the nominal voltage for a lipo. storing them at a higher voltage means they are resting at a higher stressed state of charge. fine for few weeks but months, you should drain them down to 3.8.

The cutoff voltage really depends on the application. High output lights don't consume 100s of amps. same with a crawler. Our kind of cars easily hit 100s. XLX2 over 300amps. The voltage sags when you blip the throttle. As the battery drains it sags more and more. So for high amp drains you want it to cut out earlier so it doesn't sag so hard that it damages the battery. This is in turn reduces the actual usable mAh that you can use.

The high end battery systems i work on at my day job all rate the capacity based on expected drain rate and time.

Another important metric to monitor is the batterys IR. internal resistance, that will show how good or bad that battery is at discharging and the health of the battery.
 
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