I am trying to determine if it is time to retire some of my Phantom 3 Standard batteries. I currently have 3 working batteries, all aftermarket. The newest one, a FlyHi battery, has about 65 charge cycles on it and is almost 3.5 years old. The other 2 are PowerExtra batteries and have 186 and 171 charge cycles on them. They are both nearing 7 years old.
When taking a look at my Flight logs in Flight reader there seems to be concerning cell deviations for cell 4 particularily in the PowerExtra batteries, but I am not sure if I should be concerned as I really don’t know what I am looking for. Also, its hard to tell from the AirData graphs if I should be concerned.
Here are the text flight logs of the most recent flights if anyone wants to take a look. The flight on the 24th was with the FlyHi battery while the two on the 25th were with the PowerExtra batteries.
The battery consistently reports high battery cell deviation in the same battery cell (anything higher than 0.1 volts is typically considered to be high)
The battery does not consistently deplete as it’s being used (there are sharp depletion spikes)
The flight time is significantly reduced
If using Flight Reader, you can run a battery usage report for any timeframe to quickly retrieve battery stats like this:
Thanks for the reply. I probably haven’t been using Flight Reader long enough to get a good enough usage report. I am using Flight Reader regularly now to log all of my flights for all of my drones. It looks like the battery report has been produced in Excel. I don’t have any Microsoft apps on my Virtual Machine so it just produced a text report in WordPad (had a choice between it or NotePad). I’ll see if I can find some Microsoft like freeware to install that will do the trick.
I have been keeping an eye on my 3 working P3S batteries and the 2 PowerExtra ones which have high cycle counts and are almost 7 years old have been giving me consistent deviations. I have used AirData and it gives graphs but I find the voltage info in Flight Reader to be more specific and helpful in this case. I think it is time I retire both of the PowerExtra batteries as I don’t want to have a sudden battery failure. I will use at least one to do updates or when I need to change settings. My FlyHi battery which I flew with today did not show any deviations on any of the cells so I think I will keep it going and try to find another P3 battery at a good price so I have at least 2 working batteries.
It’s a CSV file. On my computer, Excel is set to the default application for that type of file. However, you could view it any application that’s able to generate a useful view from CSV data (like CSViewer).
Thank you for the tip. I downloaded CSViewer and set it to be the default viewer for CSV files. I like it because it is nice and light and doesn’t take up much space on my Virtual Machine.
