Using RC car battery charger for charging 18650s?

[coilburner]

I have a RC car battery charger and Im wondering If I can use it to charge my 18650s. This is the charger I have. X4 Four Port Multi-Charger | HITEC RCD USA
Its capable of charging li-ion and I can set the amps, max mAh and everything else it charges at so it seems capable to my knowledge. the charger has four separate bays or channels for charging to if I bought three battery sleighs and hooked each one up to their own output on the charger would I be good to go assuming I set all the correct parameters? Do chargers commonly found in the ecig industry balance the batteries or just charge each one individually to a certain voltage/mAh?

 

[sig-cmt]

I cannot comment on your specific model, but I used a use a Bantam e-Station + custom sled to charge my 18650s @ 0.1A for use with flashlight mods. I gather it would be no different for use with APVs.

 

[Robert Cromwell]

No battery holder?

 

[coilburner]

No battery holder?

I cannot comment on your specific model, but I used a use a Bantam e-Station + custom sled to charge my 18650s @ 0.1A for use with flashlight mods. I gather it would be no different for use with APVs.

do you have any mods with 18650s? and if you do why don't use that charger with those?

 

[coilburner]

No battery holder?

RC car batteries use batteries with wires coming off of them typically with whats called a deans plug. you plug in two wires to the battery charger that have a female deans plug.

 

[dangaranga]

yea it'll work. Just use lipo mode and set the amperage between 1-2 amps.

my buddy uses a bigger version of that charger all the time. I used my old school duratrax ICE for a while too.

 

[coilburner]

yea it'll work. Just use lipo mode and set the amperage between 1-2 amps.

my buddy uses a bigger version of that charger all the time. I used my old school duratrax ICE for a while too.

so use a separate channel for each battery? Can anyone confirm what has been said? And BTW I wont be using lipo mode, it has a mode for li-ion.

 

[dangaranga]

li-ion mode typically only charges to 4.10v which isn't a full charge for these. Li-po mode charges to 4.20v using the same cc-cv method and is more accurate than most consumer grade chargers we have and are actually safer because hobby grade chargers have more built in safeties than efests and such

and yes, a separate bay per battery channel

 

[WattWick]

Do chargers commonly found in the ecig industry balance the batteries or just charge each one individually to a certain voltage/mAh?

No charger knows the mAh capacity of a battery by default. It's the voltage that tells the charger when a battery is full.

"By default" I mean there are exceptions. I.e Revolectrix Powerlab chargers can be set to measure a batterys mAh capacity between two set voltages. It will cycle charge/discharge the battery a couple times while logging input/output mAh.

Balance charging only makes sense if you think of batteries in terms of a battery potentially being made up of multiple single cells wired to act as one battery. For single-cell batteries, balance charging has no virtue. If all single cells are fully charged, they are 'balanced'.

Balance charging is to make sure no single cell in a multi-cell battery is charged beyond capacity. I.e if you have a 3-cell battery that reads 10v - but is unbalanced - you may have two cells at 3.5v and one at 3v. You don't want to put as much power into the two at 3.5v as the one at 3v. IOW you can't simply charge until the pack reads 12.6v without risking two of the cells being charged to i.e 4.5v and the third to 3.6v.

 

[93gc40]

yea it'll work. Just use lipo mode and set the amperage between 1-2 amps.

my buddy uses a bigger version of that charger all the time. I used my old school duratrax ICE for a while too.

You would have to use the Lipo mode. But unless it will charge at LESS than 1amp, I would not use it for E-cig batteries.. A fast charge is great in an emergency, but it will severely shorten the life span of the battery.

 

[coilburner]

No charger knows the mAh capacity of a battery by default. It's the voltage that tells the charger when a battery is full.

"By default" I mean there are exceptions. I.e Revolectrix Powerlab chargers can be set to measure a batterys mAh capacity between two set voltages. It will cycle charge/discharge the battery a couple times while logging input/output mAh.

Balance charging only makes sense if you think of batteries in terms of a battery potentially being made up of multiple single cells wired to act as one battery. For single-cell batteries, balance charging has no virtue. If all single cells are fully charged, they are 'balanced'.

Balance charging is to make sure no single cell in a multi-cell battery is charged beyond capacity. I.e if you have a 3-cell battery that reads 10v - but is unbalanced - you may have two cells at 3.5v and one at 3v. You don't want to put as much power into the two at 3.5v as the one at 3v. IOW you can't simply charge until the pack reads 12.6v without risking two of the cells being charged to i.e 4.5v and the third to 3.6v.

with the charger I have I can set an end mAh cutoff.

 

[coilburner]

You would have to use the Lipo mode. But unless it will charge at LESS than 1amp, I would not use it for E-cig batteries.. A fast charge is great in an emergency, but it will severely shorten the life span of the battery.

I believe it will charge all the way down to .1 amp

 

[sig-cmt]

do you have any mods with 18650s? and if you do why don't use that charger with those?

Because the custom Keystone sled I use tends to snag cells wraps and having to use magnets to chain cells (when charging loose in the typical fashion) becomes tiresome. Also, balancing individual cells is only useful during discharge cycles to verify/confirm problem cells.

 

[WattWick]

with the charger I have I can set an end mAh cutoff.

I can only assume all that does is telling the charger to i.e "put 500 mAh into this battery"; not stopping at an exact mAh storage level.

You can always try it and see what happens. Take two identical batteries at wildly different charge states - tell it to "charge to a set mAh" and measure the voltage once they're done. My guess is they won't be at the exact same voltage. I may be mistaken - and I don't mind being proven wrong

 

[dangaranga]

You would have to use the Lipo mode. But unless it will charge at LESS than 1amp, I would not use it for E-cig batteries.. A fast charge is great in an emergency, but it will severely shorten the life span of the battery.

You do realize that an amp is an amp, whether it's from an rc charger in the appropriate mode or a ....ty efest charger.

The battery will last longer (cycle life) being charged with the r/c charger since they are more accurate with the charge algorithms and won't slightly overcharge them like most consumer grade chargers like the efest Luc series.

And you people on these forums get way too caught up in charge currents. Majority of the lithium chemistry batteries can handle 1C charge rate without cell degradation.

IE: 25r 2500mah would be 2.5 amps with no effect on cycle life

 

[WattWick]

That is sort of a point...

People pushing batteries till they almost sweat liquid lithium - but profess handfeeding them a single, locally sourced hydroplant mAh once every blue moon to keep them from degrading.

(This post may contain trace amounts of hyperbole.)

Keep in mind RC chargers comes in all shades of the quality spectrum as well. There is nothing inherent to the product category that automagically makes them better or worse than any other assembly of electronics and wiring. Tons of crap chargers out there.

 

[Robert Cromwell]

According to Mooch your batteries will last longer if only charged to 4.1 volts vs 4.2. No an extreme difference but a difference.

 

[coilburner]

I can only assume all that does is telling the charger to i.e "put 500 mAh into this battery"; not stopping at an exact mAh storage level.

You can always try it and see what happens. Take two identical batteries at wildly different charge states - tell it to "charge to a set mAh" and measure the voltage once they're done. My guess is they won't be at the exact same voltage. I may be mistaken - and I don't mind being proven wrong

I remember back when I was big into RC cars, about two years ago, that you can put a battery in at whatever charge level and set the end mAh and it wont charge past that point. It doesn't just put in the set mAh into the battery it cuts charging off when that mAh is reached.

 

[DaveP]

Fast charging is probably fine if done right, but having a box full of 18650's and slow charging them at 1A max is probably better for long life. I like to rotate batteries by storing them in a snap top battery case. Charged batts go in one end and come out of the other end in rotation. There's never a time when I feel the need to push one and they all get rest time out of the charger before use in FIFO mode.