No eBay APP ID and/or Cert ID defined in Kunena configurationA recent example of gravity’s wonderful power left me with a slight predicament, 3 fully charged batteries and no plane to fly them in. My charger has a discharge to storage voltage option, but it takes hours and hours, and yet more hours to discharge one battery, and I don’t think it is great for the charger either.
So I was on the lookout for a fairly painless discharging option, and one that ideally discharges to a preset level. Cheap would be good too.
So for less than £14 you can get this:
A little research on another forum showed that it did actually work.
You get a cell checker/balancer and with this version an extension circuit board that you plug your battery into, and three 50W halogen light bulbs. On the cell checker/balancer you dial in your desired discharged voltage (in my case 3.84V), and it then turns on and off the lights as it ‘burns’ away the power.
I mounted the lights on a block of wood, I’ll put a guard around them later.
As with any halogen light bulb, never touch the quartz envelope with your bare fingers, the oils on your fingers creates a hot spot and will cause the quartz envelope to weaken/melt/explode.
The circuit board that the battery plugs into has a deans connector, so I made up a short deans to 4mm socket lead so that I could plug in whatever charge lead I needed for the particular battery.
It took 31 minutes to bring a fully charged 3000mAh 6S battery down to 3.84V per cell. It does seem to ‘balance’ the cells throughout, but the last little bit of balancing down to the final voltage takes a while, so once it had stopped using the light bulbs I stopped it and the cells were all within +/-0.01V of each other according to my iCharger .