How to balance a li-poly?

[tienman04]

Is there a way to balance the cells without having to get a balancer?
Doesn't the balancer just tell the cell voltage? Can I charge each battery individually?

[dodgey]

You "can" balance the cells individually - just plug them into your charger individually and charge as 1s - though your charger will have to be well behaved and charge to the same value each time (though it shoudl do this!).

The main problem is getting access to each cell. If you have balance leads then no problemo, but then you might as well grab a balancer - for the few bucks it costs it will save you trippling your charging times and all teh messing about

Another problem I run into charging individual cells is that you will need to make decent plugs to go into your balance leads on your packs. I find if you just stick in tiny wires, you can't charge at much amperage as the dodgy contacts are not good enough and the charger errors out.

Saying that - if you only plan to balance once in a while - there is no reason why not. Take meter readings of each cell and see how they are now - you will probably be suprised at how close they are to each other. But to be honest - balancers cost squat so you might as well get one.

What balancers do is measure the voltage, and depending on which balancer you have , some actually inhibit charging to high voltage cells until the others catch up, whilst others gently drain high cells to let the others catch up, or they drain the high cells/s at teh end of teh charge to let the others equalise.

At least I think that's what they do. I say "think" because I have the Flight Power balancer, and it hardly changes temperature whilst connected to a dormant pack that is being balanced. - I would have expected a fair amount of heat generated whilst a cell was being discharged. The FP balancer has no vents or heat sinks.....

[tienman04]

well...I just received the TP 205 balancer and was wondering exactly how this work. So I plug in the battery to the balancer and the balancer shows up a certain type of light.

If it is already balanced then I can just simply charge the pack normally.

If the pack is out of balance then I will have to charge it at 500mah?

So what exactly does the balancer do besides telling me that the packs are balanced or not?

Does it balance the pack when it is out of balanced?

[dodgey]

yep - that's the whole point :-) - exactly how it does it - you'll need to check with TP