After a day of flying, do you need to balance charge your batteries and then do a storage charge, or can you do a storage charge even if they are below 3.8 volts, and the charger will bring them "up" to a storage charge of 3.8 volts per cell ?

Thanks
Danny Z

Storage charge post flying is all I do. Depending on where you end your batteries, they may actually recover to storage voltage and then you never need to bother storage charging them.

When I get back from a day's flying, I check each battery. For those which show between 3.7 to 3.8V per cell, I just put them back on the shelf. If any are lower than 3.7V, I put them on storage charge to bring them up to 3.82V per cell before storage.

Charging them to storage voltage is a balance charge anyway, just to a lower termination voltage, so there's no need to first balance charge and then storage charge.

(07-Apr-2017, 07:22 AM)unseen Wrote: When I get back from a day's flying, I check each battery. For those which show between 3.7 to 3.8V per cell, I just put them back on the shelf. If any are lower than 3.7V, I put them on storage charge to bring them up to 3.82V per cell before storage.

Charging them to storage voltage is a balance charge anyway, just to a lower termination voltage, so there's no need to first balance charge and then storage charge.

This is what I was taught to do by a local guy with one extra more specific detail. I try to fly my batteries to the point that they hit a storage voltage specifically so that all I have to do is check them. If you have an OSD that will tell you voltage it's one easy way to get a feel for how close you are, or I imagine you could use telemetry on the radio but I haven't rigged this up for myself yet. 

On my quad with 1300 mAh 4S batteries about 4-5 minutes will get me to about 14.8 volts during a hover depending on how I have been flying the rest of the battery. (this generally translates to about 15 on the ground or 4.75 per cell) Generally this will use up about 1/2 to 2/3rds of the capacity and is about right to come in for a landing. 

Then the only thing I really have to worry about is the cell balance. Since I balance charge before flying typically my batteries are .01 different or less between cells when I am done flying.

I agree, this is the most kind way to use your batteries.

On most of my quads, I have the warning beeper set to go off at 3.5V and I land as soon as I can when it turns on and stays on. They generally recover after a few minutes to around 3.7V.

However, as motors get larger and take ever more power, I'm thinking of raising the warning voltage to 3.6V on my more powerful builds as I've noticed that if it takes me another 30 seconds or so to land that the cells are actually all the way down to 3.5V even after resting for a while.

Thank you for all the great information !!