Charging and Storing LIPO's

[NoddyPilot]

Hi everyone!

Just joined the forum and my first question is to see what you all do with charging/storing LIPO batteries.

I am incredibly spooked by endless stories about LIPO fires I must say. When my kids arrived my helis were put away, LIPO's storage charged and were relegated to the attic. At the end of a long hot summer, I went up to the furnace that my attic becomes and stumbled on my LIPO's sitting there looking at me. Nightmares of midnight fires ensued and my LIPO's were demoted to a bucket in my shed since then!

Now I getting back into it all again with my new MSRx. So I am thinking how to deal with LIPO's being back in use again. I know the majority of LIPO incidents are the result of mishandling but some cases have occurred where it was a defective battery that caused the problem. Some cases also involved stored LIPO's that had not been used or charged in the past day. So it isn't just charging it seems!

I know I am paranoid about this topic, but I will tell you what setup I have. I would be interested to hear what everyone else does.

The general advice seems to be to never ever charge indoors. This country proves that advice to be for the US I think! I do not have an outdoor facility I can use in bad weather, so it's indoor charging for the most part.

I currently use a IMAX B6AC+ Charger for every battery and balance charge every time. Never charge at more than 1C. I have adjusted my flight times to avoid discharging my batteries beyond 20% remaining charge.

All charging LIPO's are in a LIPO bag, which sits on top of my aluminium case I store my charger in. Generally I have the case sitting on my tiled kitchen floor also. My charger also has a temperature probe so that goes on the battery in the bag with the charger set to cut off if the temperature goes above ambient +10 degrees or so. Incidentally, I never have had any battery warm up at all while charging.

I also set the charger capacity and time limit functions. Capacity to what I expect the battery to take plus a small margin (generally 90% of the mAh rating) and time to 60 mins, since the 1C charge from 20% capacity should not take more than that!

So that's charging! Am I just off the wall paranoid about things going wrong??

Now I have kids in the house, I am planning to use my 12V field battery to power my charger on good days so I can leave the setup outside the back door too...

For storage, I have my LIPOs in a small charge bag in a metal cash box on a wooden shelf.

Let me know what you all do!!

And probably make me feel rather silly at the same time I expect!

Barry

[James]

You can't really be too safe with LiPos, they can be a bit dangerous, and just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not watching you!

[NoddyPilot]

Ha ha! That's very true!

I think I will stick with what I'm doing for charging as I can't really think of anything else I can do to mitigate the risk! Other than simply charging outdoors as much as possible.

For storage, I have three new lipo bags coming soon which should neatly fit the three sizes of lipo's I am currently using. They should then all be in three separate bags in my cash box which will help me sleep better!