Oh, I remember now. Your charge is showing how much it put in the battery to bring it to full charge, not what the total capacity is.
My hobby charger does the same thing. The amount it shows at end of charge will vary depending on how low the cells where before charging.
It’s been a while since I used my hobby charger.
Liions run down to 2.5v/cell unlike lipos. You should set your lv soft at 3.0 at cutoff at 2.8. To prolong life also dont charge above 4.1v.
Your charger has a profile for LiPo and Li-Ion. They are not the same. The low voltage cutoff is different. If youre only discharging to 3.3V then you’re wasting a good 30ish percent capacity.
@Namasaki what you man with total capacity then? Do you discharge your cells completely till zero so they dont give up any more power?
Or you just meant that the discharge capacity is not the same as charge capacity?
@ralphy I think it is pretty good… this way u should now know that below 3.1v there are the rest of the capacity more or less… which would be around 350/2 = 175mah per cell or so right?
What I mean is that a typical hobby charger like the one I have, does not display a battery’s total capacity at the end of charging. Instead, it displays how much was added to bring the battery to full charge.
Example:
If your battery’s capacity is 6000mah and it is at 50% charge when you recharge it, your charger will display 3000mah.
This is why @ralphy battery displayed a higher number after discharging his pack lower before charging it to full again.
Unless he discharges his batteries to 0% which I think is something like 2.8v per cell, it is not going to display a full 6000mah no matter how many charge cycles you put it through.
@Namasaki well that is quite logical, indeed… I just thought you had some more things to add to this…
Like, maybe, the ‘‘losses’’ or extra capacity which might be added to bring all the cells to the same level… though I havent really looked into it, does it really makes a big difference to the mah rating the charger shows
i was reading that when you speed charge you can jump up quickly to maybe 80 percent of full capacity and all is well but if you attempt to speed charge to full charge, even though the charger will cut off after a shorter time and the voltage maybe have been up to 4.2, the lithium chemistry needs the longer time to absorb the energy and it will drop to a lower voltage. A better way to say it maybe: the voltage will rise quickly with a speed charge which is misleading as the ah put in it will be less and after the cell is pulled from the power source it will decrease more than if it had been put on the charger with a slow charge to full