Battery Charge Not Lasting

Charles Limberg · Oct 23, 2015

If I let my batteries sit for a couple days, they naturally loose some charge. I noticed though that if I fly on the 3rd or 4th day, I may have 80% remaining, and my cells deplete extremely fast when accelerating. I have had 22 flights and have drained them twice. Battery life says 95%. Your thoughts?

inspire909 · Oct 24, 2015

your not supposed to let your batteries sit charged for that long. your damaging the cells inside the battery. if your not going to use the lips the day you charge it you should keep them stored at 50% until your ready to use them again then charge them back up and fly

SuperPete · Oct 24, 2015

I have 3x TB48's, same problem. One battery 6 charges 98% life, drains fast.
two batt's are 15 and 14 charges 95% life and drains fast...

sad story...

SuperPete · Oct 24, 2015

inspire909 said:
your not supposed to let your batteries sit charged for that long. your damaging the cells inside the battery. if your not going to use the lips the day you charge it you should keep them stored at 50% until your ready to use them again then charge them back up and fly

No NO, if you keep them over 10 days or more than you store them, 2-3 days can be stored at full charge.
IF I fly every other day, how much time is it going to take me to charge and store charge and recharge with multiple batt's i have, LOL, it's like full time job

up to 10 days can be stored at full charge

ajohnsonlaird · Oct 24, 2015

There is a user settable parameter for how many days you want the batteries to go before they start an automatic self-discharge. You can get to this via the Go App. Select the "battery with aircraft icon" just to the left of the percentage battery (top right hand corner) and see what the "Time to Discharge" is set to. The default is 10 days.

As to keeping LiPo's fully charged -- I've not seen anything but anecdotal evidence as to how long is "ok" to keep a LiPo fully charged. All I can find are opinions, not facts.

My *opinion* (for which I have no hard facts) is that I don't like keeping a LiPo fully charged for more than about 72 hours. Why? Well, my skin gets itchy if I do.

The fact that the default time to discharge is 10 days suggests that either I'm wrong or DJI would like to sell more batteries. <evil grin>

Andy.

SultanGris · Oct 24, 2015

they self discharge, put them in the inspire and click the battery percent level on the app screen. i think thats where you change it, default time before it starts to self discharge is 2 days i believe. you can change it to 1-10 days, i use 10 days personally. Never fly a battery that self discharges without fully charging it first, theres a firmware bug and it get the percent battery left out of wack and causes a sudden drop which varies, but for example it will say 60% left and then 1 second later it will change to 5% left and this bug has caused many crashes.

FangsCPO · Oct 24, 2015

I recommend you base your true flying time or how long your batteries last by starting with a freshly charged battery. Starting at 80% or using a battery that has been sitting around for 3 days is not a good practice and will not provide you with a true gauge on how long your batteries are really lasting in flight. Also, make sure you are back on the ground by the time you reach 30%. If you need to stretch it, don't go beyond 25%. Good Luck!

Mike Mas · Oct 24, 2015

It won't hurt a thing to leave the batteries full charged for up to 30 days - keep in mind just months ago nobody even thought about self discharging cells - not until all our cells swelled did they figure it out. Now we have this problem with cells rapidly discharging thanks to the self discharge feature.

Keep in mind folks there are hundreds of thousands of lipo's in almost every device and almost none have discharge circuits!