BEC or Battery ?

[treff]

Hi all
What's the feeling these days when using HV servos, is it to use a bec or lipo/ life, battery to power the servos, rx etc.
Would welcome any thoughts, Thanks.

[bigbladelittleblade]

I use a 2s 5000mAh lipo for the receiver and flybarless unit on my Trex 700 HV Pro, I get around 15 flights before it needs charging

[Mike Sanders]

I use a 2s 2200 mah lipo for the receiver and flybarless unit on my Trex 700 HV Pro, I get at least 6 flights before it needs charging.

[Tommy]

What's your machine and components?

[treff]

Thanks both for the quick reply. Nothing so big as a 700. At the moment just rebuilding a Agile 5.5. All servos are Savox and fbl is a Brain.
I was undecided at what to get and of course a bec is more convenient but to get cog on the 5.5 I think a battery maybe better.
It will certainly be cheaper ( money in short supply as always lol). It was the fact of having to re--charge a RX battery and of course
the wiring was putting me off sum-what. I believe because of the current draw that the wires need to be either thicker in diameter or doubled up.
Anyway thanks for the info, appreciate your time. Cheers

[Planehazza]

I'd vote a 2s lipo and an opti guard backup.

[Blackout19]

A 2s LiPo with Opti Guard backup gives you the most complete solution. A straight up 2s LiPo is usually fine as long as you get one of decent quality and ensure you know the charge level before each flight.

[GravityKills]

BECs in all my helis (X7+X7+Goblin 380 + T-Rex 450).
I had Rx packs in the early days but really don't want them back. Too much hassle, too much weight, too much risk of human error and another connector that can fail.
BTW, bad Rx-pack performance (NiCd) in extremely cold weather killed my old Raptor.

[myxiplx]

Thanks both for the quick reply. Nothing so big as a 700. At the moment just rebuilding a Agile 5.5. All servos are Savox and fbl is a Brain.
I was undecided at what to get and of course a bec is more convenient but to get cog on the 5.5 I think a battery maybe better.
It will certainly be cheaper ( money in short supply as always lol). It was the fact of having to re--charge a RX battery and of course
the wiring was putting me off sum-what. I believe because of the current draw that the wires need to be either thicker in diameter or doubled up.
Anyway thanks for the info, appreciate your time. Cheers

There are a lot of factors to consider, weight, convenience, cost and wiring are the things you have to balance out.

Sometimes the weight of a battery is needed to CG the model, if that's the case then a battery is just the simplest and easiest way to power things. If you think that might be the case it may be worth waiting until the model is nearly built so you can check the CG and see what's needed. If you don't have a problem with CG and want to keep the model lightweight, an ESC with built in BEC is the lightest and most convenient option.

The ideal for me if the CG is good is to have a strong BEC built in to the ESC. That's the most convenient of all, nothing to charge, no extra wiring, just plug & play. However if you don't have a strong BEC in your ESC, then it's really a case of personal preference as to whether you want to wire in a separate BEC, or just buy a battery and plug it in.

[treff]

Thanks again to all for the advice and thoughts. I will probably go the battery route to begin and see from there. Again thanks for taking the time
to reply.

[Blackout19]

With some of the Talon and HobbyWing ESC's having 10a BEC's they do make pretty strong alternatives to Rx packs, you just need something like an optiguard to back that up in the event of an ESC shutdown.

[Nitro Head]

A question for all the RX pack guys, when using a direct Lipo on an HV setup, do you use a switch, if you do what do you use is there a reliable solution for these currents?

[bigpops]

No switch for me. Just an EC3 plug which I connect/disconnect each flight. The Canopy has to come off anyway, so it's no effort.

If you do want to run a switch, make sure you get one that will fail in the "on" position. These are the type where usually, you remove something to power it up.

[bigbladelittleblade]

A question for all the RX pack guys, when using a direct Lipo on an HV setup, do you use a switch, if you do what do you use is there a reliable solution for these currents?

I have used one of these RC Gas Plane Charger Plug for Flag/Style Switch With Charger Plug Battery | eBay, never had any issues, but I'm no 3D pilot lol

[Mike Sanders]

My rx packs on both my 700 (HV, 2s lipo) and my 600 (2s LIFE 6.5v) are connected with a XT60 plug, no switch. From the XT60 I run two feeds into the Vortex, one into the power socket, the other into the datapod socket. This provides some redundancy and spreads the current load over two leads, I hope.

Both set ups have now done a couple of dozen flights with no problems.