Hey guys. I've been reading a ton of stuff about lipos and trying to take care of them properly. Do you all use Lipo bags/sacks to charge or store them? Also how do you know how to store them etc? Are they really as hard to take care of as they seem?
First of all you must be there when you charge..! If you have a lipo bag its better to use it if not then charge away from flammable materials... Its better not to leave the lipos fully charge for more than 3-4 days..! If you charge them and you are not going to fly its better to storage them.. Storage is at 3.83 per cell somewhere near 50% of the lipo... Never overdischarge them for instance after flight you must be aroung 3.7 per cell ......
I certainly use Lipo bags when I'm charging them or transporting them to and from a shoot. I also put them in a cooler so that their temperature is held pretty constant. After flight they make good hand-warmers. The Hyperion charger (and others I'm sure), have a Store setting which will take the voltage up or down to a mid-point voltage suitable for storing the Lipo. I don't to leave the Lipo's fully charged or discharged for longer than I have to. If I plan to fly tomorrow and the weather is crap and likely to be so for another day or so, I'll take them back down to storage voltage rather than leave them fully charged. Searching on the web led me to many sentences that ended in "....and then there is a risk that the Lipo will catch fire." So, yes, you do have to be careful how you charge, discharge, store, and handle them because if you mistreat them "there is a risk that the Lipo will catch fire." And is it's a nasty metal fire -- you need a class D extinguisher to put them out and unless you have, er, money to burn, you probably don't have one of those. The Lipo bags will not stop a Lipo fire, but they will contain the flames (but not the smoke). Bottom line: they're not hard to take care of them once you understand what the deal is -- the price you pay for having such high energy storage and incredibly high discharge rates (because of their low internal resistance) is that you have to view them as hazardous if you over charge them, charge them too fast, drop them, puncture them or mistreat them in any way. If you over discharge them, they may not catch fire but they may never be the same again and will not store as much energy. Get a good quality LiPo charger too ....otherwise "there is a risk that the Lipo will catch fire." Andy
PaNt makes a good point: When I'm charging them, I try to be in the same room (albeit working on something else). I also have a battery powered smoke alarm above my charging shelf -- which happens to be a stainless steel counter. The tough problem is when you're out on a shoot and in a hotel room.... Andy
At home my charging is done inside an oven with the door 1/4 open for venting. When away on a shoot I charge in the hotel bathtub. One thing I will never do is travel by air with fully charged lipos. I always make sure I'm scheduled one full day solely for charging.
Both good ideas, Howard. I certainly wouldn't travel other than by car with fully charged Lipos -- and then only when they're in Lipo bags. It's like traveling with an incendiary bomb even then.
So… how are we supposed to travel around the world on shoots? We need a safe alternative from Free Fly.
"PaNt"? I believe you've started something new, AnJoLa. We should all be given molecular nicknames. Regards, St₃Ma₂
Hmm. Not sure why I used what programmers like what I is, call "Camelcase." E.g. CaMelCase." I suspect it's residue from when Pavlos Antoniou (PaNt) was using a user name not his real name.. By the way, I don't think we have discovered St and Ma -- until today, that is. AmDy (Americium, Dysprosium).