No you can't just trash them. Check with your city or county and see if they have a battery disposal site. Also, check with you're work. If you deal with IT or manufacturing they sometimes have a battery disposal bin.
I am pretty sure my local HomeDepot and Lowes take rechargeable batteries to recycle. Battery Warehouse, Batteries+, and Battery Depot all take them as well.
wait you mean I can’t just throw them in the dumpster at my work? Damn now I know why it caught fire the other day.
I have a few dead soldiers myself. The overly football shaped I put on my dischargers and set them to kill. Meaning 0.0v per cell. I do this outside, someplace safe/fire resistant. When its done the kill cycle, I put them in a bucket of sand and let them hang out there until I remember that they're in there (which can be a long time). At which point I'll drop them off at the electronics/battery dropoff at the local public works.
If they decide to spontaneously combust, having them totally buried in sand (or submerged in water) will prevent the fire from getting out of control.
I've heard dropping them in a bucket of salt water is also a viable solution. For rendering them inert, that is.
I think I have a LiPo that is going bad. Its a little over 3 years old. It wont discharge or charge balanced. One of the cells is about 10% higher than the other two cells. Its a 11.1v 3S LiPo. Physically I don't see anything wrong with it. It isnt hot, it isnt swollen up. Is this just what a LiPo does when its on the way out?
The internal cell resistance could be getting wonky, or you have a balance lead that is going bad in the plug. I would inspect the balance plug for any green wire disease and replace as necessary. I have lipos that are coming up on 8-9 years old and while I dont regularly use them anymore (we converted to universal 11.1v 5000mah packs) they still discharge, store, and balance fine.
The red line in the balance connector had pulled out just enough to not make a connection. I pushed them all back in the connector and it seems to be putting a proper storage charge on the battery. I'll know more in a little while.
Indeed. I must admit, I only started putting a balance charge on these batteries in the last couple months and they are over three years old. I have a venom pro duo charger. Do you happen to kmow if it has a balanced storage charge?
Here is my formula for long lipo life and minimal fuss: Balancing every single time isn't always necessary, but you definitely want to do it regularly. After an event I use designated dischargers (ISDT brand) to bring the batteries down. Once the discharger kicks off, I then put them on a storage charge cycle (including balance) to get them to a nice healthy storage voltage. Even I have had a lipo fire. I dropped a lipo from workbench height to hard concrete floor and forgot to put it aside for disposal. It ended up back in circulation and on the charger it started to make bad noises. I managed to take it outside at the hotel at NATs before it decided to go Fuego. If I wasn't there in the room with it, holy moly it would've been bad.
if I understand you correctly, put a Balance charge on the battery to charge it frequently. After I battle put it on the discharge cycle until it turns off and then put a charge on it?
So I have designated discharger units, ISDT used to make a "small" one but now they only make the big 200w unit: FD200 - ISDT Most chargers don't balance on their discharging circuits, only charging, so if you put a fully charged battery on your multi-purpose charger and selected "STORAGE" it would discharge the battery down to storage voltage and call it a day...regardless of if the cells are balanced. ALSO, discharging generates heat and most chargers can't discharge at any real high rate. I like to put that heat/stress someplace other than my $$$$ charger units main PCB's. So I use my designated dischargers to go down to mostly fully discharged, and then I use the charger on a STORAGE cycle to bring the battery back up while balancing it, to a storage voltage. Clear as mud, right?
Actually yes. So I don’t have spend the $75 bucks on that discharger. Can I use my Venmo duo to discharge and then a storage charge. Effectively doing the same thing?
Yes, that should accomplish the same thing, check and see if the charger does balance on the "way down" and if it does you can skip the discharge step. But I have a few venoms and dont believe they do, unless they've updated the firmware or something in the years since I bought mine.
