Phantom 1 Power Draw

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Hi. I'm new to owning a drone and was curious about how much power my Phantom 1 would draw. There are probably answers here, but I did a quick search and didn't see what I wanted, so I decided to start this link. Forgive me if it's "old news" and a duplicate of information that those of you who have owned drones for a long time are tired of seeing.

I connected my Phantom 1 to a 12VDC UPS battery which measured 12.6VDC nominal with no load. I used a precision shunt resistor with 0.05Ohms resistance and measured the following current draw at various loads:

No Load, standby (no motors running, GPS searching) 220 milliamps
Idle, motors spinning at idle speed 1,040 milliamps
Liftoff 9,000 milliamps (9A!)
Full Power 16,000 milliamps (16A)

The voltage at the drone terminals was about 10.9 VDC at the full power setting, so the power consumption was about 175 Watts at full power. No wonder a 3,000 Ah battery lasts only about 10 minutes! Looked at another way, my Phantom 1 pulls about 0.23 HP at full power (175 Watts/746 W per HP).

Again, thanks for bearing with me if this is "old hat." I'm an engineer and wanted to share some basic information.
 
Welcome to the forum.... :)

Still have two (2) flying P1's so I was intrigued with your power measurements....

Any chance you can share photo's of the setup you used to measure power usage at different operating stages?

Also, what was your P1's takeoff weight when you made the current draw measurements?

P.S. Treat your LiPo's well and these birds will never let you down.;)
 
Thanks for your question and for the welcome! My P1 weighs just under two pounds -- 1 pound plus 15.7 ounces! My test setup included a 12VDC battery as used in my UPS (a 1234W battery), with the positive side wired to a 0.05 Ohm Dale wire-wound power resistor. From there I wired to the positive side of the P1 with a wire and alligator clip. Then, from the negative side I went straight back to the negative side of the battery. I used a Fluke digital voltmeter to read the voltage across the 0.05 Ohm resistor. 0.05 V across the resistor equals 1 Amp of flow through the circuit. I read about 0.8 V across the resistor at full power, so concluded a current through the circuit of 16Amps. Hope this helps.
 
Thanks for the clarification.... I was just curious how well you replicated what the P1 would see under actual flight conditions.

Regardless of where your interests lie (piloting, aerial photography, etc.) you're going to find the P1 an awful lot of fun to fly.
 

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