if you fully charge the rx battery, and then put your plane up for a week or 2 should you still recharge the battery the night before you go flying? also same question about the glow starter battery? and does recharging a full battery hurt them at all?

You should put them on charge for a little bit before heading out. And idle battery slowly looses it's charge over time. But you don't need a long charge time, just pop it on the charger before going to bed the night before flying (unless you stay up until 3am, and leave for the field at 6am the next morning, but you get my point).

You CAN hurt the batteries by overcharging them. Which is why you don't want to just leave the batteries on charge all the time. However, with the slow charge rate of the wall-wart charger that came with your radio, you actually have to charge it for quite a while to do any damage. A bit of extra time on charge won't do anything. I've accidentally left batteries on charge for 3 days with no harm, for example (don't try this at home, I got lucky, you may not).

One cute trick some guys use over the winter is to set their wall warts on one of those plug-in timers used to convice theives you're actually home. Just have your charger turn on for about an hour each day. Fully charge the packs, then put them on the timer, and they should be ready to go when you are. You can also buy trickle chargers that are designed to maintain a charged pack at full charge with out over charging.

I agree with Kirk. If it's been more than a day or two I always throw the packs on the wall wart over night before going to the field. And I've left my packs on the charger for a week accidently without problems, (but here's my disclaimer), don't do this intentionally because you could cause damage.
Dennis-

Or get an ace digipace 3 and have all of them on trickle charge so they are always ready to go. I think I paid $70 bucks for mine.

If you store the nicad in really cold temps, it will drop faster in storage than room temp too.

You should be careful about overcharging. About 6 years ago, I went flying one weekend, left town for the week, and my dad charged my batteries for the next weekend. He forgot to discharge my reciever battery, and just plugged it in. Since batteries charge at a higher rate than what they are rated for(4.8v packs need 6v input to charge, and 9.6v packs need 12v to charge), the batteries can hold way more power than they should. Well back to the story, I went flying that weekend, and lost a plane. upon inspection of the wreckage, I noticed that the switch harness had melted the shielding on the wires between the battery and reciever. The wires shorted and caused the controls to lock up, and send my easy sport in a full speed death spiral straight into the dirt. My advice would be to run the batteries down then charge them for the 12-14 hours reccommended by the radio maunfacturer.

No need to run the battery down before charging as long as you are charging at 0.1C (the typical wall wart charger that came with your system). They will not harm your battery even if you leave it on for several hours more than the recommended 12 to 15 hours. This is assuming you are using NiCad batteries. See Red's site www.rcbatteryclinic.com for some good honest and common sense info on batteries. More planes are wrecked by undercharged batteries than over charged ones.

Well maybe something else caused the battery to run away, and melt the shielding. What I do know is that something with that battery caused it to heat the wires up to the point it could short the switch, and send her in. When I say discharged, I don't mean run down to the point that it couldn't swing a voltmeter off zero. I used to have one of those hobbico voltmeters that would only read 4.8 & 9.6 volt. When it was in the red, it was time to recharge.

It wasn't hte charge that killed your wireing. Voltage doesn't melt wires, current does. So the fact that the wall wart charger is at 6v or whatever, but only 50ma, it's not enough to melt much of anything.

However, I've had wires go in to melt down mode on nearly drained batteries. 4.4v and a short is plenty.

It doesn't take much, just something that draws too much current. A short is the most common cause, something like a hole in the insilation will do it. I had one battery let the smoke out after a crash, when a chunk of ply nicked a wire lead. The short then melted wires and actually melted a hole in the bottom of the coro and foam fuse.

If you use a switch with too thin of wire (like a micro switch), and then do something like stall a bunch of full size servos (esp digital servos), you might even be able to cause a failure in the switch just from the servos drawing enough juice. I haven't tried this, so I don't know for sure, but in theory it's possible. In the real world, I don't think it's likely.

I did have one servo that had a short inside the servo case, it melted a battery connector on me as well. The servo was fixed by the manufactuer, the battery was toast. Fortunatly, the RX wasn't harmed, even though all the current was going through it's leads.

I have a peak charger that I use for TX and RX batteries. I usually peak charge them when I get back from the field, and then peak them the night before I go out to the field (usually about a week later) just to top them off. A good peak charger won't over charge your batts when you do this. I don't mess with the wall wart chargers...

It wasn't something causing an excessive drain from the battery. I still have all the components, and all but the battery and messed up switch harness are a.o.k. I do know that batteries can run away on their own, meaning that they will just start discharging for some reason, create massive ammounts of heat, and possibly explode. While I was a Marine, that was one of the many things that we had to go through training on the Cobras and Hueys for. It is possible that there was a nick in the wire, and chances are that was exactly what happened. But an increase in voltage will also give you an increase of heat.

Subject: rx batter question

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