Same for mine. I usually give mine an overnight and it's happy.

It only goes right accross with a Li-po in it.

5.6 is fine for a 4.8V nominal NiMh

standard battery is 2000mah and charger gives 150mah. could take 13.3hrs if was completely flat. so as vikki says overnight is good enough. lipo is worth getting last weeks.

Don't leave overnight!! A fellow club member did that and won't be doing it again. I can't remember whether the battery and compartment caught fire, or just melted but it wasn't pretty whatever it was. Now obviously Horizon had it all back and replaced it without question but all the same, that could have been very different. Their advice was that after the initial long charge (which should indeed be 12 or 13 hours) 2 or 3 hours should be plenty and to be honest, I find that to be the case too, sometimes a bit longer if I've let it go right down near the 4.4v mark but I rarely do that.

Given they're not NiCad's so they don't suffer the memory effect I just top it up for a couple hours every few weeks before I go flying and it seems to be fine like that.

There is no memory effect. What happened was that there used to be a high self discharge. Batteries left for a long time or older batteries left for any time self discharge. This would be ok if they all did it together or if the battery was left long enough to discharge all cells. Unfortunately there is usually one that is much worse so what happens is that one cell needs a full charge and the others just a topup. Cycling seems to cure the problem but only with the risk of reverse charging the flat battery which then ruins it completely. A regular topup once a week is ok as MartinW says. We used to overnight charge NiCds but Nimhs are less tolerant of overcharge. I prefer fast charging with my icharger at 0.5C (two hour charge) from flat. Nimhs last just as long as lipos as far as I can see if you charge them correctly. When fast charging you have to remember that the charge will stop when the good cells are full, as they warm up and their volts drop. The weakest cell may have been flat and so you can only guarantee that the battery will have the capacity of the weakest cell. NiMhs and NiMh charging seems much better than it used to be. If you do have a single flat battery you can either fast charge again after an hour or more or slow charge at C/20.

convert to lipo plug it in when the light goes off on front of tx its charged much better and lasts alot longer to

Might be dumb question but are you charging the lipo still in the tx with the charger that comes with the dx8 or would it be better to take it out the tx and use my main batt charger?

no charge it in the tx has you would with standard battery the battery has somthing built in to it to help with this the light goes out on tx when battery is charged