Best Drone Battery Choosing Guide

What you should consider to looking for the best drone battery? There are so many drone battery brands and advertisements in the market. Capacity, voltage and discharge rate are the basic parameters of drone battery, how about others factors? and how to looking after the drone battery when charging, discharging and storaging them? And do you know what’s the hv and smart drone lipo battery? For these reasons we write this articles for you.

About Drone sizes

As we know, there are various types of drone, such as Tricopter, drone, Hexecopter, Octocopter, Y6, X8 etc. Before you purchase the best drone battery, you should know more details about it. Base on the needs of the applications, we can divide the drone into 7 types as below:

• Aerial cinematography: Big enough to lift a specific camera with tall landing gear.Such as DJI phantom 2/3/4, S1000 etc.
• Sport & Social: Super light-weight and extremely stiff for crisp and responsive control.Such as QAV 400/500,FLIP FPV,TBS Discovery etc.
• Sport FPV: Lots of mounting surfaces for extra electronics and action cameras.Such as Flip sport /DJI F450.
• Mini drone: Very small and virtually indestructible.Such as Hubsan X4 ,Eachine H8 Mini ,syma x11 etc.
• FPV drone: Virtually indestructible with space to mount electronics and sometimes an action camera.Such as QAV250,250mm quad etc.
• More professional uses such as package delivery, agriculture.
• For research or personal robotics development.

Choose different drone lipo battery is depend on the size of your drone, not a battery which is not possible to meet all of your requirements. Therefore we search huge volumes of information via internet and give a range match chart for you.

Capacity, Voltage, Discharge Rate

#1. Voltage

Battery voltage or the cell count is an important parameter that need to be noted before you purchase any battery. With a higher cell count, performance is maintained above par. However, higher cell counts translate to an increase in weight which, in some cases, affects performance.

#2. Discharge Rate

Discharge Rate is yet another crucial aspect that need to be checked before you decide to settle for any battery for your drone. Batteries with an extremely low discharge rating often result in under-performance. However, this does not necessarily imply that those with the hightest C-Rating are the best since they are heavier. You need to get a battery whose C rating is convenient for your drone.

Discharge Rating =Ah * C-rating

Read more from here How to choose battery for quadcopter

#3. Capacity

As we know, Bigger lipo battery can be powered more energy. In fact As the battery gets larger, the increase in flight time becomes ineffective, because of the weight of battery. Therefore the capacity is directly affects the filight time of drone. How many capacity shoud you choose? It is depend on the calculate result of flight times, how to? Click here: Quadcopter flight times calculate

Brand & Price

There are many drone battery brand in the market including Tattu ( Gensace ), Bonka, Hobbying ( Multistar / Turnigy / Zippy / Graphene ) , SMC, Dronelabs, Ready MadeRC, ThunderPower, Floureon, Venom, Pulse , E-flite etc. Which brand do you think has the best batttery quality for drone? Don’t worry, we will recommend the best drone battery to you in the last section of this article.

About price, we tell you a formula ( Price/performance ratio = capacity / price), but the premise is that the Voltage are same and the C-rating are similar.

For example, we only assume that you do not know which one is the best price between 1550mah 4s 90C ( $38 ) and 1300mah 4s 95C ( $29 ), below is calculate results of price ratio:

1550mah 4s 90C price ratio is 40.8 = 1550mah / $38

1300mah 4s 95C price ratio is 44.8 = 1300mah / $29

Both of them are suited for your drone, we suggest you to purchase 1300mah 4s 95C battery.

Drone battery connectors

There are many common connectors include Deans, XT60, EC3 and JST etc. What is the performance impact of these connectors? Connectors you are using will also be able to handle the current. Below is connector current ratings:

• JST connector – up to 5A
• XT60 connectors- up to 60 Amps
• Deans – up to 60 Amps
• EC3 connector – up to 60 Amps
• EC5 connector- up to 120 Amps

About high voltage battery

What’s the high voltage battery? The lithium ion electrode potential is about 3v, lithium battery voltage will change with different materials. After the optimization of material and craft, lithium polymer battery cut-off voltage can be improved up to 4.5v. The high voltage lipo battery is meaning 4.35v per cell.

There are 3 advantages of HV battery,

1. More power more energy
2. More high C charge
3. More Flight times

About smart battery

What is smart battery? A smart battery is a rechargeable battery pack equipped with with a built-in battery management system. The smart battery can internally measure voltage and current, and deduce charge level and SoH (State of Health) parameters, indicating the state of the cells, calculated and predicted information to its SMBus Host under software control.

Smart batteries have the following advantages:

• Provides the user with accurate state of charge information along with an accurate prediction of the remaining operating time;
• Auto-balance inside when the voltage is different between the cells;
• Provides state-of-charge and full charge capacity;
• Reflects capacity estimations; records battery history; including cycle count, usage pattern, maintenance requirements, max error, etc;
• Auto discharge in high temperature, under static or storage stateand;
• Auto alarm fuction;
• Configures charger to the correct algorithm;
• Reminds user of periodic service;
• Protects battery from unauthorized use;
• Prevent accidental system cut-off;

Top 5 best drone batteries for FPV

All above drone batteries are highly recommended by experienced pilots, and they are most popular batteries in the FPV drone market, we can often see these battery brands in the FPV events. You can directly choose one by click the link of ‘Check price’.

Top 5 best drone batteries for UAV

All above brands of these battery are compatible with UAV, drone including FPV, multirotor like DJI S800 / s900 / S1000 / OnyxStar FOX-C8-HD / Gryphon X8 and other multicopter etc. It need most of times for hover in the skly to shoot videos for AP drone, therefore the battery c rate is not need too hight to much explosive power. Click the ‘check price’ to check out the real price.

Top 5 best drone battery balance chargers

The best drone battery should be compatible with a good charger. We should consider these factors cell count it can support, charge current rate, charge power, discharge rate and price etc, when looking for the best battery chargers. Some chargers can provide two or more complete charging circuits, it can charge faster more than single charger solutions, such as above Venom battery.

Drone battery Care Guide

Best drone battery is depend on the current levels of production and material quality of manufacturers, but you can looking after quadcopter lipo battery to lengthen their lifespan, how to? Below are some tips about Chargeing & battery Care Guide:

#1 Charge drone battery guide

One point is that you should never charge a new lipo battery or place it in your rc hobby to do a balls to the wall performance checking flight. Because a new lipo should be a few cycles with lower rate before using or charging them.

In my experiences, the IR of lipo battery is still coming down after 5 cycles even as many as 10 cycles. In battery safety instructions is that 1c charge rate is the standard “safe” rate.

Freshly charged batteries run and last a lot better than ones that were charged days before, that’s a tested fact. You should be charging the drone until it hits up to 50%-60% and then stop it. Later on, charge the rest of the battery before you go to fly it.

Don’t over charge, Some chargers would not cut-off and still keep charging after the battery’s full charged to 4.2V. Besides, some chargers won’t stop charging for the aging of its components. Therefore, there needs to be a look-after when you are charging your lipo battery.

#2 Discharging drone battery guide

Don’t over charge, the discharge curve of the battery shows a rapid voltage decrease for the first few seconds, and the voltage drops slowly when it is discharged between 3.7V and 3.9V. Then an accelerated decrease when the voltage gets below 3.7V. If the battery’s over-discharged, you may get your battery damaged or even get your quadcopter crashed.

About discharging temperature, the cell shall be discharged within -20 °C ~60 °C range specified in the Product Specification.

The cell shall be discharged at less than the maximum discharge current specified in the product specification. High discharging current may reduce the discharging capacity significantly or cause over-heat.

#2 Storagedrone battery guide

The cell shall be storied within -10 °C ~45 °C range environmental condition. If the cell has to be storied for a long time (Over 3 months),the environmental condition should be:

Temperature: 23 ± 5 °C

Humidity: 65 ± 20% RH

You should not store a fully-charged battery for over 3 days. If not being discharged,the batteries would get puffed after being stored over one week. However, some batteries would not get puffed temporally, but they may out of work after you store them fully charged for a few times.

Conclusion

If you have any questions about drone battery, please leave your message on there and let me know.