Etronix PowerPal Touch Question

[dibble34]

Hi all, I just purchased one of these, but I am not convinced it is working quite right. I choose 7.4v balance Lipo charge and the cells start charging. On the main screen it shows the total voltage as 8.4 volts so starts reducing the amps, however if I look at the individual cell screen both batteries show 4volts, not 4.2!

This in turn means it is going to take ages to charge the remaining .2 volts on each pack.

If I then plug the same batteries into my old gt charger, the voltage on each cell matches the etronix reading, but it shows around 8.27v total so carries on charging correctly.

I have tried resetting to factory settings on the charger, but to no avail.

Has anyone else got one of these? Is it expected behaviour?

Cheers

Dave

[dibble34]

Right. set charge at 5500 mah and 5.5v and it took 100 minutes to charge 2000mah. Surley that cant be normal? This was regardless of whether I chose balanced or not. These are decent orion saddles that seem fine on my old charger

[dibble34]

Last thing I can think of is what you set the capacity to. I have set it to 5500mah to match the battery capacity. Should I increase this? Would this speed the charge up? I am having the issue charging individual cells so not a balance issue.

[imull]

The capacity and charge current should be independent, as the capacity is only used to shut off the charger (normally) for safety reasons.

The voltage readings are different due to the point at which the charger monitors the voltage, the pack voltage is done at the output of the charger and the balance at the end of the balance leads. If you put a DVM on the cells whilst charging you normally get a different reading to that of the charger. Only chargers with sense leads (old eagle CDC) or calibrated (protrak) give an more accurate reading at the end of the charge leads.

As for the charge taking so long, how soon does it reach 8.4V? From that point it's in constant voltage mode and dropping the current all of the time to maintain the voltage. If it spends ages charging at 0.1A and not really putting much juice into the cells that might be where all of the time is going. Some of the 4 button chargers have a fast charge mode where the constant voltage phase isn't held for so long, i.e. you get a good enough charge without waiting for every last milliamp to go into the cells. If yours has that, try it and see if it improves things.

Ian

[dibble34]

Hi Ian

Thanks for responding, a friend had the same charger at the track so I tried that and it worked fine. Same settings, even same cables! Sent it back and got an elan mini which seems fine too :)

Dave