glow starter care

[Delarado]

Guys, little simple one here. I have a tamco 2100mah NIMH glow starter thing.

I generally fly 3 max 4 tanks each session on my nitro, and I Tend to just charge my glow starter for a few hours before each flying session.

Is this ok or should I not charge so often? What do you do? Because im led to believe theres no real way to tell the charge state of nimh?

[trillian]

With NiMh it won't hurt it if it runs down and there is a certain amount of self-discharge when not in use. I have one that I always use and I like it because it has a little guage that makes it easy to see if it's making good contact with the glow plug or if there's a short in the extension etc. I find it stays charged a really long time, well over a week. So what I usually do is just keep using it till I can see it's getting low and then I charge it overnight and it's charged for a good while again. For a glow starter I don't think there's technically anything wrong with the quick top-up charge approach though. I think I have had this one for 3 or 4 years and it still works great.

In short; Charging to less than full capacity will not hurt it as far as I know, over charging will shorten its life. So as long as you're not charging beyond its capacity or voltage you should be fine. (and not charging at too high a rate without a temp sensor)

[Delarado]

I generally just charge it the night before for 2 hours or so. I may be over charging it... Im just using the standard wall plug type thing. I guess ill just keep using it until it doesnt work one day, then I know thats my limit

Will it self discharge itself if left unused for a couple of weeks then?

[dieselcarb]

if it was totally dead the standard wall charger would take at least 16 hours to charge it fully and even if you left it on charge for 24 hrs it wouldnt kill ya battery. if you did it every day for like a year then yes i would expect the battery not to hold much mah and have a real high internal resistance but i doubt it would pop 1 in a 100 might

if fast charging then yes u need auto cut off or it wont last

[jimmyhorns]

I only need to charge mine about once every 10 flying sessions, though it has a 4000mAh battery. Even then I only end up putting about 2500mAh back into it.

Id probably chill a little on the charging, unless you leave it attached for a long time while the engine is warming up.

[trillian]

I generally just charge it the night before for 2 hours or so. I may be over charging it... Im just using the standard wall plug type thing. I guess ill just keep using it until it doesnt work one day, then I know thats my limit

Will it self discharge itself if left unused for a couple of weeks then?

Yeah if left un-used it will eventually run down. Maybe not completely in two weeks it's hard to say. I know mine stays charged enough to be useable even when sitting for a week at least.

I'm not at all scientific about the charging so I just try to judge based on how much I think it is drawn down and this one has been going strong at least three years now, maybe 4.