Quote:
Originally Posted by Slowkrawl
Thanks for the reply! The whole "C" rating thing is still taking a while to sink in, but from what I gather the higher the mah, the less "C" you could get away with, correct? Is it how FAST the battery can discharge or by how many amps/volts it can draw for a length of time? Does the "C" rating just stand for current?
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The C rating indicates how much the battery can discharge in Amps, and the higher, the better. Especially for brushless setups and when your hammering on the throttle. Having too low of a C rating can cause the battery to heat up beyond the safe 150F mark and can stress out the ESC causing it to fail or even burn up. Both of which are very bad.
Excerpt from LiPo Tutorial
http://www.robotwars.00server.com/tutorials.html
The C rating is also known as the discharge rating. This is a measure of how much current ( in amps) the battery can output before it will overheat and become damaged. Most lipos have the C rating listed in their specs, but this doesn’t actually tell you how many amps the lipo can ouput, there is a very simple sum however:
Mah capacity x C rating / 1000 = output potential.
For example, a 10C 5000mah pack can output 50amps, and a 20C 4000mah pack can produce 80amps. This however is assuming that the C rating on the pack is accurate. If you are in doubt, there is fool-proof way of determining the C rating, but it requires additional equipment. Using an Eagletree data logger or similar, you can record the voltage level of a lipo in relation to the amount of current that is being drawn from it. If the voltage level remains at about 3.0v or higher per cell at the specified C rate in amps, then it is accurate. If not, then it is over-rated. An example of this would be a 20C 5000mah pack outputting 100amps and staying at about 3.2v per cell. The graphs can sometimes be hard to interpret, but if you have the current and voltage graphs on the same chart, you can easily locate the voltage at any given current output.
One important thing to concider when choosing a pack based on its C rating vs mah capacity is that 10C packs will drop their voltage heavily when taxed to more than about 12-15C (the typical peak or burst rating of 10C packs). A 25C pack will happily deliver in excess of 35-40C before its voltage output drops, so dont always assume a 10C 8000mah pack will be just as good as a 25C 5000mah pack in a high-drain application; that would be a false economy. For low drain setups however where runtime is more important than current output, you would be fine with the lower spec, higher capacity pack.