What to do with days old batteries?

I can't do 5min. flights. So having my battery set topped up works.
I like to move around quite a bit. On any particular day, I may fly at three or sometimes even four settings in one outing. So I want to get the maximum flight time I can possibly squeeze out of each location.
Even with full batteries, I often feel like I wish there were even only another five minutes left, just to capture a few more awesome minutes on video, or still captures.
The longer I can fly, per session, the better I feel about my personal large investment. ;-)

RedHotPoker
 
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I can only speak from personal experience. I seem to remember reading long ago to avoid charging the battery if in a higher state of charge, 80,90% etc. to avoid establishing a charge ceiling however I have no evidence to confirm this so for now it's only a myth. I try to avoid leaving batteries in a charged state for longer than 3 or 4 days only through my personal belief that there's tons of energy packed in there wanting to be dissipated. In the dozens of times I've flown with batteries charged for 7 to 10 days 8t has not affected flight time or performance by what I would perceive as possibly 10%. In other words, I may reach 35% capacity from a full charge in a minute less than if I was using a freshly charged battery. I have noticed that if I use say 50% and half 50% left, the charge is not impacted if I use the battery that day, however, in the few times I used a battery at say 40 to 50% after a disharge a couple days previous, there is absolutely a significant impact. I could only say that in the imperfect world of having full batteries laying around for 5 or 6 days that you are safe to fly from my experience in hundreds of flights.
 
Battery experts on this forum are like oil experts on the car forums.... They all seem to be experts... While all the others that don't follow their expert advise seem to do just fine. Go figure.
 
I can only speak from personal experience. I seem to remember reading long ago to avoid charging the battery if in a higher state of charge, 80,90% etc. to avoid establishing a charge ceiling however I have no evidence to confirm this so for now it's only a myth. ...

Yes, I was worried about this too at first. The Li-Ion batteries became popular around 2001 or so, and we were told to be careful with them as they have a memory and you will muck things up if you run it down to only 80-90% and then recharge it. We were told it's best to run them down to around 30% and then do a full recharge. But from what I've gathered, these Li-Po batteries are different and don't have such a memory. Apparently we can charge them from 80-90% to 100% and there are no risks regarding memory.
 
I've seen no evidence of inaccurate remaining charge/time from not topping off, but it will happen if you don't discharge to 8% after every 20 flights.

80% is a problem because it removes the top 20% you may need to safely get home if the wind changes, or RTH gets activated, or Autoland kicks in at 10% over water. That 10% Autoland over water would otherwise be a very safe 30%. It's your bird and your risk, but I always top off before flying. Heck, even at 100%, by the time everything warms up, you are already at 95-97% before getting into the air.

It's not every 20 flights, it's discharge cycles. You can see how many cycles in the app, or using HealthyDrones.com
 
The longer I can fly, per session, the better I feel about my personal large investment. ;-)

RedHotPoker
Have you considered professional therapy?

Although buying another drone might be cheaper in the long run.
 
I've had my batteries sit a week at full charge.When firing up the Phantom they'll show around 95% or so. Never had an issue. I wouldn't use a 50% battery unless I was purposely draining it for a full discharge.

The problem here isn't what the LEDs show. It's what the controller THINKS vs. how many amps are actually left. It's a very complicated issue with any battery. It seems that DJI has a pretty good handle on it. But not perfect by any means and the big issue appears with partially charged batteries that have been stored for anything greater that a couple of hours.

Remember, just because there are not lights going off on the battery doesn't mean that it's actually off. The microprocessor in the battery is doing something all of the time. If it gets confused, you may have absolutely no indication of that and the bird apparently doesn't have enough data to get the answer right all of the time.

These things are incredibly complex.
 
hi,
If I go to a site and return with batteries at 40%,I let them sit until next weekend and charge them up
If I come back from a site and they have 20-30% then I just charge them up the same day ...I just dont like to leave batteries on low or high charge for extended period of times which is +7 days for me
(but the auto discharge was never changed from 10d)
 
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