I bought a bunch of my set up last night and now I’m getting into the wiring trying to figure out what my plan is. I’ve been reading around and have decided that (for now) I’m going to stick with a balance charger as opposed to a BMS. But that leads me to a few questions I was hoping someone could help me out with:
I have 4 of these batteries and am wondering what the best way to charge them is. I’ve read that a lot of people recommend the IMAX B6 charger but from what I understand (which may be incorrect) that only supports a 5s battery. So to me that means I would have to charge all batteries separately (which sounds like a nightmare). So how should I got about charging these correctly and easily?
Are there any safety features that are typically built into the electronics on the board? After I get this balance charger figured out I’ll throw together a preliminary wiring schematic.
Hi there!
You can charge the batteries in parallel if you are careful. That means you have to check if the individual cells of all batteries are within ~0.02V to each other. But that would still take awfully long as the imax b6 only has 50W of output (correct me if i’m wrong) and would need 10 hours to charge the whole 20Ah.
My recommendation would be an ISDT charger. They come with higher wattage for reasonable prices and i’ve been using the 500W one for a while now. Only thing is that you would need a power supply for them, which can be cheaply diy’d using an old server supply from Dell or HP and modding it to always put out 12V.
That gives you around 300 Watts usable with the ISDT Chargers, if you would want the full 500W output, you would need 2 of those supplies in series for 24V output.
