LIPO parallel balance harness question

How does the charger or LVC-HVC board can detect the voltage of every individual cell in a pack when the balance harness is set up for parallel charging? I've been trying to find a thread on this without any success.

I asked that same question a month back. Turns out when you parallel a pack (and then also parallel the balance-leads) you are essentially just making each of the packs cells larger capacity. So the charger will still see a 5S4P (37V 20AH *when using 5Ah packs) as ONE (large) 5 cell battery. I believe when you parallel the balance leads, those paralleled cells will equalize among themselves to become the same voltage, then from that point on they will: drop together, and recharge together. That's why it's important that your cells are at the same voltages when you start plugging 'em together... Also: you wouldn't want one higher V cell dumping it's current into lower-voltage cells when you plug 'em together. Because (as just said) after you plug the cells together in parallel, their cell V will all align with one another, creating one larger cell.

I think that answers the question. Those with more experience could have answered that in one or two sentences. I'm still a noob.

Thanks EBJ!!! During the off season, I will be converting to LIPO. I'm still deciding on what I want. I saw El_Steak's amazing 24s 3p build a couple of weeks ago, we live in the same city. Check out his threads, there is a lot learn.

i also have a 24s 3p lipo build; it fits inside an axio swift harpack. 12 kilos or so, and i get probably 45 mins of 60km/h+ out of it, or hours and hours of 17km/h.
You should parallel the balance taps of each battery, but if you disconnected those taps and used something like a battery medic you would be able to see the voltages of the individual cells again, even if the main +/- leads are all in parallel.

Get a Hyperion charger. It's worth it.

One thing about paralelling packs. If you are using the typical 6s or 8s charger, it doesn't balance very fast on the now larger pack. I don't know about the hyperion, but on the cheap chargers the balancing function is not sized for working with packs that size, such as 10 ah. So it can take a really long time to balance a pack that is more than .02 out of balance.

I've been doing it like this, I have permanently paralelled two packs together at the main wires. But not at the balance wires. About every 10 cycles or so, I'll balance charge them. Before I hook up a y connector to paralell the balance wires, I look at the voltage. If pretty close, say within .1v I connect and balance charge them. If way off, then I hook a small B6 charger to just the one low cell in one pack and bring it up closer before plugging in the jst's to the paralell harness.

You can just leave the y connecting harness in place if you like, but the point I am trying to make is that if you permanently connect the balance wires, you can no longer look at the voltage of an individual cell. I've had one cell in a 2p 5s pack go bad. So I remove the bad pack, and retain the still good one. Hard to tell which is which once you solder the balance wires paralell.