Short flight Using Battery on Storage Level?

[stuka75]

Is a short five minute flight using a battery at storage level feasible? The desire is to get spontaneous pics and vids without having to charge battery or keep battery topped off.
Thanks

 

[msinger]

It's possible, but it's not a great idea. You could run into trouble if you run into a situation that requires more battery power than you planned to use.

 

[Older_Man]

As stated it is doable but how long is 5 minutes when your having fun ? then if something happens and you need the power to get home and you don't have it.Yes it's possible but give yourself plenty of battery to get back in case you do.

 

[BigAl07]

Can you VS should you is the real question here.

There have been numerous "speculated" crashes due to taking off with a less than full battery for flight. I had such an instance where I took off with 80% and at approx 50% I started getting strange "Battery Errors" with the charge levels plummeting rapidly. Unfortunately I did not get the A/C back to me and it was lost in an attempt at an emergency landing off-site. I take full responsibility for this as I made the decision to take off for a long flight with a less than fully charged battery.

A better course of action is to set-up a battery routine in where you carefully manage your batteries through flight/charge tracking and keep approximately 1/2 of your inventory always mission ready. That's how we maintain our aircraft/batteries in an Always Ready state for Search & Rescue.

 

[stuka75]

Can you VS should you is the real question here.

There have been numerous "speculated" crashes due to taking off with a less than full battery for flight. I had such an instance where I took off with 80% and at approx 50% I started getting strange "Battery Errors" with the charge levels plummeting rapidly. Unfortunately I did not get the A/C back to me and it was lost in an attempt at an emergency landing off-site. I take full responsibility for this as I made the decision to take off for a long flight with a less than fully charged battery.

A better course of action is to set-up a battery routine in where you carefully manage your batteries through flight/charge tracking and keep approximately 1/2 of your inventory always mission ready. That's how we maintain our aircraft/batteries in an Always Ready state for Search & Rescue.

Can you explain your technique/protocol for doing this? My friend does have four batteries.

 

[BigAl07]

Can you explain your technique/protocol for doing this? My friend does have four batteries.

We number every battery and keep very detailed logs of each one. This way we know if a battery is getting more use than another. That's the logging portion and critical to proper battery rotation.

We have 12 batteries (for one aircraft so we always keep a min of 4 batteries "Topped Off". These are kept at 100% for up to 5 days. If we haven't used them in those 5 days the DJI Go Ap settings will start the battery drain process automatically. At that time we then bring 4 other batteries up to 100% to maintain 24/7 mission ready status. Without careful record keeping this could get into a mess of confusion in a hurry but it does allow us to be ready to go in a matter of minutes.

As a side note... even the 100% READY batteries get topped off on the way to the scene in the vehicle in order to arrive with a fully charged set of batteries. Once on-scene we can start the process of bringing the others up to FULL charge using 3+1 chargers and an inventory of single chargers.

 

[stuka75]

Great protocol. Thanks all for the input. I'll share this with my friend.

 

[stuka75]

I wonder how this protocol affects the battery lifespan??

 

[N017RW]

DJI batts are about as self-protected as you get. All of the safeguards are built in so it's hard to misuse them.

 

[solentlife]

I had 3 batterys ... one went bye bye when I landed in the river !! Another story ...

But anyway ... its very easy to create a schedule use system.

Charge one battery one day .. charge second next day ... charge third next day ... have all on same GO aut-discharge setting .. I used 3 days. This means that I had a full battery on any day ...

BUT .. as I posted on another thread - using the battery LED's to determine state of charged is open to error. FULL 4 LED can be anything from 87% to 100% .... so I always check my battery before use on a programmable LiPo charger and if voltage shows down - it gets a short boost. Of course APP will show voltage if you tick the options box.

There are many variations of battery management - but I think most agree that the DJI default of 10 days is too long before auto-discharge.

Nigel