Servos and battery drain
 

Tower says the S3001, S3003, and S3004 have high current draw. They say nothing about the S3151 having high current draw. Then the LHS says the S3151 ( digital ) drains your battery quicker. Could some one explain this a little deeper? Thanks

RE: Servos and battery drain
 

You're talking about this text, right?
"This servo can produce high-current draw from your batteries. If using NiMH or LiPo batteries, make sure they are capable of delivering sufficient amps."

They've had this warning for a while, and it seems to cause significant amounts of undue concern. I can only guess that they put it there because some people tried using lower capacity NiMH batteries and had problems. I typically use 1500 mah or higher NiMH packs and they've got more than enough capacity for the typical number of standard servos.

RE: Servos and battery drain
 

To expand a little on what Chuck said. The chemistry of a NiMH (and other newer types of batteries) makes them a little more sensitive to large battery loads. I'm talking about the load that can occur when two or three servos are placed in motion at the same time. This was a huge concern in the hobby when NiMH's first hit the street, a lot of flyers (myself included) were very nervous about moving to NiMH's for fear of having a failure in the air. But if you use larger capacity batteries (1500+ MaH) this just isn't an issue. Having moved to NiMH's years ago I love the difference it makes in my flying day. I can go to the field and fly 70+ minutes of flying time from a battery pack, and still have juice to spare.

When you throw digital servos into the mix the whole story changes. Digital servos can, and do, drain your batteries quicker than standard analog servos will. This is one of the downsides of using digital servos in a plane. It's something that somebody needs to take into consideration when planning on using digital servos in a plane. For me I just don't get enough benefits out of a digital servos to justify the lowered flying time for me to use them. I would be willing to bet that 99 out of 100 average flyers couldn't even tell if a plane had digital servos in the plane just by flying it. What I'm trying to say is that most of us don't really need them in a plane. I know that I don't.

Hope this helps

Ken

RE: Servos and battery drain
 

Thanks for the info. It looks like I should get analog bb servos and put the savings into a larger battery pak.

RE: Servos and battery drain
 

That's what I would do.

:D

Ken