HobbyKing Turnigy 20C lipo after 1 year, 200+ cycles

[electr0n]

oatnet, that's a good point. Cycle count alone doesn't mean that much unless we also know the depth of discharge each cycle and the discharge rate.

My cycle analyst says I've used 1350 amp hours, plus there's a fair amount more that's not been logged, and this is all from the same set of batteries.
Probably two thirds of those amp hours were done using a 24s 10 amp hour battery configuration when all my packs were new and working good. That accounts for about 900 amp hours or 90 full discharge cycles. The remaining 450 amp hours were mostly discharged in a 24s 5 amp hour configuration which works out to be another 90 full discharge cycles.

So at least 4 of my 9 batteries have seen close to 180 full discharge cycles if not more. The other 5 packs have somewhere above 90 but less than 150 full cycles on them. Of those 5 packs 2 of them are still used intermittently when I need a longer range. The other 3 packs have some bad cells between them and I could salvage one more useable pack from them plus have a couple spare cells.

It's also worth mentioning that I was pretty hard on the batteries, mostly discharging between 5C and 10C peaks and often upwards of 2C constant.

Next I'll do some capacity tests to see how many useable watt hours I have left in these aging batteries. It should be interesting.

 

[electr0n]

I charged up to 4.08v per cell and drained them down to 3.7v and got 450 watt hours out of a potential 666 ( 6 x 5ah 22.2v nominal ). That's about 67% capacity.
If I charged them up to 4.2v and took them down to say 3.5v I guesstimate I'd have somewhere above 80% capacity. I never take them below 3.7v and generally charge them up to 4.16v max.

I think I can get another year out of them yet.

 

[Ykick]

Even the old ones perk up a bit in warmer weather. Winter is when I really notice age and poor IR.

Oatnet makes good point and that's why I usually claim "shallow" charge cycles when bragging about good service from my stash of RC Lipo.

 

[OlaGB]

I had 4 x 5s5000mah nanotech's (running as 10S) in a rc plane, that all of them had 500+ cycles over 3 years, without feeling i lost alot of power/capasity at all.. Delivering 80-85A max, never below 20% capasity, and always charged at 2C.

Now im at around 70 cycles on my 6s8000mah (running them as 12S) nanotechs pulling 135A max out of them, and love them. Going to use them in my ebike also.

We are alot of people in my rc club using nanotechs, without having any problems at all.