Learning the Basics of Charging

[SPACKlick]

As I understand it, charging is all about trade offs. Faster charging reduces battery life, fuller charging reduces battery life. I don't know why, these are just things I have been told.

I'm trying to get prepped before my first mod order and the batteries I'm planning to buy are Panasonic NCR18650PFs. The charger I'm looking at, unless I get told I'm making a terrible mistake or see something of similar quality significantly cheaper, is the XTAR VP1 2-Channel

Now, here's my confusion.

The Xtar charges at 0.25A, 0.5A and 1A. I plan to run my batteries down to between 20% & 50% only occasionally allowing them to drop to not working. How do I calculate how long my batteries will need to charge?

 

[Scott_Simpson]

Well, first of all, you have selected a good battery and a VERY good charger! I've had several chargers, including the much-praised PILA, and the XTar VP1 is far and away the best I've come across. Secondly, I always use the .25A setting (the lowest and slowest) because I like to pamper my batteries. I have AW IMRs that are still performing perfectly after a year and a half. I have pairs of matched batteries for each mod in my active rotation. I rarely let my batteries get below 3.6V ... looking at my battery charging spreadsheet (yes, I'm really that .... about batteries ), I see that my NCR18650PFs (2900 mAh) are charging from 3.6V to full 4.2V in about 7 hours at the .25A setting.

 

[Rickajho]

You don't. The point of getting a quality charger like the VP1 is it knows what it's doing and terminates the charge when the battery has reached the correct voltage. It's the crap chargers you have to be paranoid about where you run the risk of charging batteries to over voltage. The VP1 isn't going to do that.