Home Made Lipo Battery Discharger
Recently a few of my lipo batteries have become unbalanced, puffed or both. To safely dispose and recycle lipos they need to be discharged to 0 volts, most battery chargers have a discharge cycle but they still don't discharge completely to 0 volts. I built this little discharger from a few simple parts.
Parts:
The simplicity of discharging a lipo is you need a electrical "load" to drain the battery, a light bulb works well and you can visually see the battery being discharged. Also the load is small and consistent so it does not place too much stress on the battery but I still discharge in a metal container or in my BBQ in case anything goes wrong and the battery catches fire. This discharger will work for 3s or 4s lipos, if you want to discharge higher cell count lipos you could hook more than one bulb in series to increase the resistance. If you want to speed up the discharging you can hook more bulbs in parallel. |
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