SammysHP[Review] SkyRC MC5000 battery charger and analyzer – a worthy successor to the MC3000?
toadjones79And I’m over here like “red light turned to green so I’m good.”
I’m glad you guys know and do all this battery stuff because you create a wealth of knowledge I can pull from when the time comes. Speaking from my experience with flashlights, which I am still in awe of the knowledge and how useful it is/was when it came time for a new light.
Thanks for the review.
𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍🤝
I am willing to spend money on the best battery charger that doesn’t require me to know anything about batteries. I know the value of having tools over which you have fine control and can tune, but that’s, like 0.01% of all the tools I use - the rest, I have at best superficial knowledge of the field, and have no time or interest in becoming an expert; and giving me fine grained control over the tool is only increasing the chance that I’m going to damage something.
To me, value is in the tool knowing more than I do, and doing the right thing. For battery chargers, that usually means a toggle for fast/slow charging. I know enough to know that faster charging is usually less healthy for the battery, so if I have time, slow. If I’ve run myself out of batteries, fast.
And I’m not even sure that rule holds for modern batteries! It’s something I learned so long ago I should be suspicious about the knowledge.
So, yeah. I’m sure this is great for some people, but for me, charge me more because the charger is smarter than I am, not because it’s dumber.
ZakSeveral chargers in the $20-40 price range measure the battery’s internal resistance and pick a reasonable charge current based on that. Many of those have an override for charge current but it would be convenient to have the option of just fast or slow based on that measurement.
The rule still holds. Charging fast is harder on batteries. It’s true for phone batteries too, so all these new phones with three-digit charging wattage are likely to wear out quickly.
MangoPenguinThe thing is it’s not possible for a charger to know how fast a battery should be charged, as that varies widly between different types of cells. It would require RFID tags on each cell or something like that.
So it’s not technically possible; that’s fine. If the charger can’t tell, I guarantee I won’t be able to, either.
The cell will have a model number on the side you can use to get the datasheet, which lists the max charge rate.
Alternatively just use 0.5c rate on everything which is easy.
Yup - already more work than I want to do. I do not have a heterogenous cell collection, so I’d need a spreadsheet to track everything and consult it every time I needed to charge.
That’s what I was saying about there being some domains where the knobs and dials are valuable to me, and a whole lot more where the value is in the tool being more knowledgeable than I am.
This charger sounds great for battery wonks. I prefer smarter charges so I don’t have to fiddle with battery charging; there are other things I’d rather be spending my time on.
The manufacturer web site is almost unusable and doesn’t have an ordering button. There’s a “Where to buy” link way at the bottom, that doesn’t work for me. Web search shows this is about a US$ 200 charger. Ouch. Thanks for the review but yikes. Also I don’t want to install a phone app to use or update the charger. You are right that the missing features being important (PC interface, bidirectional USB charging).