I have a few 4 Cell 5000mah batteries at the moment and I am new to all this fancy battery charging.

My Hexacopter tells me when the battery is low, and the charger tells me in mah how much it has put back into the battery, at the moment I use about 3000mah for a 7-8 minute flight, how far can I push these LiPo Batteries before I start to damage the thing?

Cheers

Cris

You should never let a Lipo battery discharge below 2.5 volts per cell absolute minimum, 3 volts per cell is a safer limit. Normally you should aim for running to about 80% usage, so for a 5000 mAh battery you could use 4000 mAh. This will prolong the life of the pack and also give you a reserve in case of problems, especially useful for a multicopter.

It's also a very good idea to always balance charge the packs, it will again prolong the pack life, and give you early warning of a faulty pack.

pca

Excellent, 4000 mAh will be my tank empty then

I'm getting 8 minutes flight time out of 3000 mAh, and that is powering the downlink and everything else on board too.

So far this experiment is going well !

Cheers

Cris