How to Charge More Than One Lipo Battery At a Time

If you’re tired of waiting countless hours to charge all of your Lipo batteries for your drone, then this is the tutorial for you!

In this tutorial, I’ll be going over everything you need to know in order to charge multiple lipo batteries. by basically using just one part that you don’t already have called a parallel charging board, you’ll be able to charge up to 6 Lipo batteries all at the same time.

Why You Would Want to Do This

Let’s say you’re out flying your drones at the park and you need to charge 12 lipo batteries. Maybe you have 6 lipo batteries for a quadcopter and 6 for a hexacopter. If you were to charge all 12 batteries individually, it could take over 12 hours! That’s where having a parallel charging board comes in. Using this  parallel charging board, since it can charge up to 6 lipo batteries at once, you could easily  charge 12 lipo batteries in less then 3 hours!

What You’ll Need

• Battery charger (any lipo charger will work but I recommend having at least a 50w charger)
• XT60 Parallel charging board (or whatever charging board that has the right connectors for you)
• XT60 charging connector (or whatever adaptor you need for your batteries)

How It Works

Using the parallel charging board, all of the battery cells will be charged and balanced almost perfectly. The way this works is, basically all go the batteries that are connected with work together to charge as one big battery pack. See the diagram below to get a better idea of the layout.

As you can see, each cell inside battery 1 is connected to an identical cell inside battery 2. When the 2 identical cells are charged in parallel, they will equal each other out and charge as one massive cell. So when charging 2 batteries, the charger will only see 3 cells no matter how many batteries your charging, but all of the cells in all of the batteries will still be at the right voltage because of this “natural balancing effect” that happens when the cells are connected in parallel.

How Many Amps You Should Charge At

Usually, to charge a lipo battery you just take whatever the capacity number is (which in my case is 1.6 amp hours) and that’s the number of amps that you charge at (some people call it the charge rate). Then you tell the charger how many cells the battery has. But if you’re charging multiple batteries in parallel, the process is a little different. If you’re charging a bunch of 3 cell batteries, you would still the the charger to charge 3 sells, but the formula for calculating the charge rate for multiple batteries is this this: amp hours, times how many batteries you have, equals the charging rate.

Things You Should Not Do

• Because the lipo cells are connected to each other throughout multiple batteries, you should never plug in a fully or half charged battery with a battery that’s dead. Basically, the farther apart the voltages are, the hotter the wires will get. So all of the batteries should be hovering around the same voltage.
• Another important thing to remember, is that you can’t charge two completely different batteries with each other. You can mix lipo packs from different brand names, but the cell count needs to be the same, and the battery capacity needs to be the same.

The video