I charged my Maxamps 7.4V 6000mah 2s2p lipo on my Hyperion EOS 5idp AC/DC charger with LBA10 balancer yesterday. It was charged at 1.25amps. I noticed that when it got to 8.4V the charger didn't stop but instead the charge rate dropped 0.30amps (possibly milli-amps?) and decreased slowly (.29, .28, etc) for the time that I was observing the charging process. I think it was charging at 8.4V like this for about 10minutes before I stopped the charging process because I did not know if the charger was supposed to stop when the voltage reach 8.4V or if it needed more time. Should I let the charger continue to charge until it stops? I would think this fairly good charger would have an automatic stop.

What's the normal charging behaviour for charging lipos near the end of it's full capacity? (in terms of voltages, time, charging rate changes, etc)

Also, something less important but odd was that I had to restart my charging of this lipo three times to reach the top voltage charge of 8.4V in the above. For info, this lipo was in storage for about three weeks and the voltage reading before charging was 7.59V. I think there wasn't much mah in it; about 1000mah or less. Is it common to stop falsely (like "false peaking in charging nimh" )?

What you are describing is exactly how LiPo's charge....

Constant Current, then Constant voltage


Lots of great info here
http://www.rcbatteryclinic.com/

you are right, all professional lipo battery charger use CC/CV mode to charge, constant current or limited current at the beginning of charge, then constant 4.2v/cell to charge till charging current drop to a preset value.

when the battery is fully charged, the battery should be 4.2V/cell, such as 2p2s battery voltage is 4.2*2=8.4v. nP3s is 12.6V,

if the lipo battery voltage is 3.8V/cell or so, the capacity is 50% of rated capacity, take a 6000mAH / 2p2s / 7.59V battery pack as sample, the capacity is about 3000mAH ( discharged at 1200mA till 5.5V).

More valuable information at www.chargery.com

What about the restarts I had to do? What could be the problem here? Could I have overcharge the lipos by restarting again or would the charger automatically and immediately stop the charging process when the lipo's capacity is full?

the charger should sense the voltage and auto shut off.....

as for restarts... Hmmm.. not sure why
That is a quality charger and balancer.........

honestly don't have an answer to that......

some great advice here on this post =)

as far as the restarts, I don't think there were any that the charger did, right? Just ones that you did because you were worried about the pack?

About restarting the charger, I'm not 100% on that charger, but most decent chargers wont over charge lipos. They recognize the voltage and then go into CV. I have an ICE charger and I can charge 3 or 4 times in a row without it over charging the pack. Just watch it close the first time around. My charger after it goes into CV then it starts dropping the amps just like yours. When it goes to 0.1A charge rate or 100mA then it ends the cycle and keeps doing what it calls trickling, but it's not really trickling because you can't do that with lipos. What mine does is keep charging at that point until it gets to 0.0A input and then shuts off the cycle and goes back to the main screen. I suspect that is pretty average for most chargers.

My Triton2 does that too. It charges at 1C until it reaches 4.2v per cell then backs off the amps until it's reached 1/10C then it declares it's done. One other thing I've noticed with the Triton2 is it seems to evaluate the starting voltage at first with a small current before it ramps up to full 1C. One time I discharged my 5 cell pack to 16 volts and the triton2 then applied a small current and when the voltage reached 18 volts it started the 1C charge rate.