But using that to charge a battery would be super slow, isn’t it ? It says 68mA only. And in the description:
2.This balanced board has no function of charging or discharging,and it cannot replace the protection board.When the battery is in the end of full charged,it will discharge by resistor to first fully charged battery,namely shunt and balance function
68ma is what it will burn off as heat in the resistor to balance I think. it will charge at whatever rate your charger is charging at. if charging too fast, since only 68mah is possible to discharge, you could potentially be putting much more into the highest cell than this device could possibly be able to burn off and therefore have a cell go too high while charging. how out of balance it would have to be and charging at what rate I don’t know but it’s not much. @scepterr or someone has changed the resistor to make it discharge more. without the higher discharge than the 68mah, and with a way out of balance cell, and a high speed charger, could be bad.
unfortunately it only balances a cell once it goes to 4.2 (adjustable to different voltage maybe with different bits?). Isnt there a version possible that would balance constantly so even if only 68ma discharge ability it would be balanced before it was charging and that would enable the weakest cell to stay more within range? In that case it would be less likely to be charged beyond 4.2 with a fast charge.
If the device wont keep the weakest cell under 4.2 or something not much more than that while charging then it’s just giving a false sense of security and asking for disaster
That means that balancer isn’t really great. Given the price, it’s not even surprising. I was curious as it’s clearly different than a BMS.
but it’s a part of a bms. maybe your bms isn’t discharging any faster?
The bms that @HumanMint is better to use in this case and probably most. My understanding is that the balance board just moves charges between the different cells to make sure they rise at the same rate, correct me if I’m wrong.
http://bestechpower.com/444v12spcmbmspcbforli-ionli-polymerbatterypack/PCB-D166.html I didn’t go through all of the ones they sold at bestech but looking just at this one it has the same functioning balancer as the plain discharge balancer I was looking at and works with 84mah, and only works with cells that have reached full charge.
theres more going on and it has “overcharge protection”. How does that work? it wouldn’t make sense to disconnect a cell that was charged to 4.2 AND also use a balance function as described above.
Id heard there were balancers that were always on and not that just work when fully charged infact I thought that was the norm and now cant find any