left seat

I just recieved a zippy compact 4000mha 8s 29.6v lipo from Hobby King. When the battery arrived I noticed that it had two seperate balance leads coming from the battery. All my other lipos have only one balance lead. I could not balance charge this battery with the charger that I have so I bought an ICharge Adapter Board from a place in the US called EP Buddy. Now this adapter board is supposed to accomedate the type of battery that I have since the board has two 4s ports on it. First I plugged in one lead from the lipo to one of the 4s ports on the board, then as I was connecting the second lead into the board...bang...it shorted frying the red wire on the battery lead and melted the pin ( red wire ) in the adapter board. It would seem that I connected them the wrong way but that is impossible since the lead can only plug in one way. There is no way you can reverse the plug. Maybe I didn't connect them properly, I'm not sure what I did wrong. Now the red wire on the balance lead is burned and I am afraid to charge the battery without balancing it. Can these leads be repaired? Can I still use the battery in this condition? It's a waste of a good battery, not to mention what I paid for it. I'm new to electrics but I have sucessfully converted three of my other plane over to battery power, but this one has me stumped. Please, can somebody help?

guver

My Feedback: (325)

Does this help at all? http://www.scriptasylum.com/rc_speed/lipo.html concentrating on the balance wiring diagrams. It's hard to see just what happened without seeing the equipment , but I'm gonna guess first that you had the two balance plugs reversed. The left one was in the right slot and vise-versa. In any case it can be repaired and as long as the cells are in balance then it can be used that way. I doubt there's other damage beyond the balance tap wires , and it may even be burned off inside the pack.

Jetdesign

My Feedback: (8)

left seat, I did the same thing when I started out charging series packs. Whatever battery pack plugs into the negative lead on the charger MUST plug into the negative lead on the balance board.

Looking at a pic on Hobbyking's website, it doesn't look like they make it too clear which balance lead has to go to the negative side that's the price of going with the chinese brands, but the good side is you can blow up 5 out of 6 packs and still come out ahead.

There is a good chance you damaged the balance board in addition to the balance tap on the battery. I've done that more than once.

There is a steep/expensive learning curve to electric, especially with the bigger electrics. I started e-power with 10S and went through all this, including making a mistake that caused 2 chargers to blow up when I was charging 4x 5S packs.