Hello!

I was in a dilemma about chargers and PSU’s for some time, could not really decide. Now I made decision and ordered them.

I went for the iCharger 106B+ charger and a Lindinger 20A power supply unit.

I went for the iCharger since it is the best and this small model has just right performance for my needs. I plan to charge my batteries to storage charge on the long run and have a full charge prior to flying. This enables long life for them.

The 20A PSU seems to be too large for the 10A charger but the more power you have in the PSU the more stable voltage it can deliver during load condition. And the less it will use the fan for cooling itself. This seemed to be a good compromise in cost and performance.

I had my first charge recorded to show some interesting details.

The charger is quite heavy, you can feel that there is material in it. Good quality feel on the house, the connectors and the buttons. I have some plastic screen protection on the display, haven’t removed it yet. Like on mobile phones, you remove this on first use. This is no quality issue, I thought I might have it on for a while.

The PSU is cooled by a fan, the fan runs very smooth and quiet. I charged one battery so far at a time, we will see how it will run on more load. I plan to parallel charge several batteries at once.

The charger enables all sort of protection features. You can have time based protection, capacity based boundary condition. You can have temperature sensor readings and stop charging on some defined value. And you have the intelligent control of charge that checks all cells during the process.

When I charged the interior temperature of the charger went up to 41 degrees centigrade, this is not much I think. The fan ran quite seldom, noise level was not disturbing in a quiet living room. My wife was reading on the couch, no comments on her side.

What is annoying is the beeping, that you can disable. On default it beeps on every press of a button. That was commented on the side of my wife, she welcomes that muted beeps 🙂

I even did a storage charge, please see noise levels at that operation in following clip.

What next?

I will read the manual, that never hurts. And I will use parallel charge soon. Ordered a charging board from Hobbycity along with 3 extra batteries.

What I read is that you should check polarity on this board. Some of them are wrong polarity, you can damage your battery if you have a wrong polarity connection. I will check mine when it arrives.

I have 10A limit on the charger, this means that I can charge all 6 batteries together with 1.66A each. This is 0,75C charging, so it will take approximately 1.3 hours to charge all of them at once. Since I don’t discharge them fully I assume that maybe less time will be enough even.

With a 20A charger this would be even less time. But I am not in a hurry. Compared to the charger I used so far this is magic speed. The other charger took 6.5 hours per battery. That is slow.

I even have a battery monitor being shipped.

This small unit can display the voltage in all cells, you can check the status on the field. Can have it in the shirt pocket, a must-have almost. Costs 1.86 USD, that is almost like a box of milk that I drink every day. 3% and 1.5 liters costs approximately 12 SEK.

I can recommend:

– the charger,

– the PSU

– the milk even 🙂

Excellent news. My cell checker arrived even.

 

 

Best regards,

Sir Crash a Lot