I don’t think we even need to go into politics to agree that nowadays, the economy sucks. Despite the dramatic decline of costs over the last ten years, we still enjoy one of the most expensive RC hobbies in existence. The introduction of the Lithium Polymer (LiPo) battery has brought on a revolution in RC modeling, especially RC aircraft, but with that technology comes expense.

LiPos have been coming down in price dramatically over the last year, but most of the time the old adage “you get what you pay for” holds true. This is somewhat the case in the realm of LiPo batteries. This is a game of power and dependability vs. price, and one of the more recent players on the field of battle is PowerEdge RC.

Recently, I was fortunate enough to pick up PowerEdge RC as a sponsor of the HeliGeek’s Blog, and they asked me if I would be interested in giving an honest review of one of their PowerEdge 2200 mAh 3s 30C battery packs. I eagerly took them up on the offer and have brought you this review.

First Impressions

Initially, I was impressed with the compact size of the battery. It was close to the size of the old Thunder Power 1700 mAh packs I bought when first starting out in RC helicopters. It was definitely smaller than any other of the 3s batteries I’m currently using.

The battery was also pre-terminated with a Dean’s connector. Unfortunately, I don’t use dean’s connectors on any of my models, so I would be changing it out.

I was somewhat surprised to see that the power leads on the battery were 14AWG wire. I would have expected at least 12AWG, similar to my other packs, but PowerEdge chose to use the lighter gauge wire. There’s quite a difference in amp capacity on all the published tables, but for the 9 or so inches of wire in these packs (don’t forget, the wire goes all the way up inside the pack) it’s likely not too big a deal.

I was happy to see that the balance lead was terminated in a JXT-H (Align) connector. This meant It would match the majority of my other packs, so I wouldn’t need to do too much swapping of adapters. I do have Hyperion and TP adapters for my chargers, but It’s always a crapshoot as to which one’s will be on your battery, and it’s a pain in the butt to have to keep swapping out the adapters every time you charge a pack.

Included with the battery was a fairly impressive instruction sheet that detailed the care and charging instructions for the pack, along with instructions for breaking it in. I’ll go into further detail on this in a few moments.

Just out of curiosity, I decided to weigh my packs to get an idea of where the PowerEdge pack stacked up. The results favored the PowerEdge pack as it came in as the lightest of my 3s packs at 6.3 ounces. The heaviest of them was the Air Thunder at 7.2 oz.

Prepping the pack

As I mentioned earlier, I no longer use Dean’s connectors, and have switched out mostly to EC3, but recently I’ve been doing some research and am in the process of switching once again to Anderson Power Poles, also known by some as Sermos connectors. I’ll be doing an article on that soon, so stay tuned.

Anyway, I got the connectors swapped put and checked out the instructions. The sheet that PowerEdge includes with the battery indicates that the pack CAN be charged at up to a 2C rate (edit: after the original review was written, PowerEdge upped the max supported charge rate on all their 30C and higher packs to 3C!). AFTER you go through the recommended break-in process that is. It’s recommended that for the first six charges you not exceed a 1C charge rate, and that you not discharge the battery below 50% of it’s capacity. The difficult part about this is that being a new battery, it’s hard to tell what that would be, time-wise.

Going by past experience, I expected to get no less than 5 minutes on this pack. My flying style isn’t the hard-core stick-banging 3D that lots of guys are doing nowadays, and I can routinely get 6.5 minutes out of a pack without coming near the LVC. Therefore, I set my timer for 2 minutes and 30 seconds and flew six flights.

I was charging the packs at the recommended break-in rate of 1C and flying only these short flights, I wasn’t even warming these packs up. Granted, I was taking it easy, even for me, but I still managed to throw in a few tic-tocs and a some other mild stuff. Once the break-in period was over, I decided to let loose!

The PowerEdge pack took everything I could throw at it and never complained once. I purposely tried to bog the head (yes, I really meant to do it) and I was successful, but it was not as easy to do as with my other packs. The PowerEdge gave whatever was asked of it. Not wanting to over-discharge the packs, I had set my timer at 6 minutes to be on the safe side. Power was consistent through the entire flight and the pack came down warm, but not excessively so. No warm-pack-puffing was in evidence, as is common on my Outrage packs.

Recharging for the first full-pack flights took place at 1C, and my Hyperion charger put back no more than 1460 mAh, which is well less than 80% for a six-minute flight. I could probably push it to a full 7 minutes with this pack and not feel any ill effects.

About the only thing I’ve not yet been able to evaluate is the longevity of the pack, and that’s only because I’ve not had it that long. All total, I’ve put around 50 flights on the pack and the results so far are good. No real performance loss has been noted and all three of the cells are discharged to within .01 volts of each other every flight. This tells me that the cells were well matched by the manufacturer and that always means a good pack with long life. I look forward to putting another 50+ flights on this pack!

Charging at 2C with a full balance charge resulted in a 38 minute charge time on average. Very nice! One thing that is recommended by the manufacturer is that you use a good charger with an integrated balancer. Something like a Bantam, or my Hyperion is just right. This is all spelled out in the great instruction sheet supplied with the pack.

I honestly have to give the PowerEdge LiPo packs the thumbs up! Their size alone is a great plus over other batteries. They give awesome power (30C rated) and are reasonably priced. Although you can find a cheaper pack, you’ll get just that: a cheaper pack. A zippy doesn’t spit out the amps that this one does.

Probably one of the best features of the PowerEdge pack is it’s warranty. PowerEdge claims the best warranty in the business, and it looks like they’re correct. PowerEdge offers a 30 day satisfaction warranty, A FULL ONE YEAR WARRANTY for defective packs, and a FULL ONE YEAR 50% CRASH REPLACEMENT WARRANTY as well! Taco your pack in the first year and they will give you a new pack for half off! You really cannot beat that deal.

Go check out the PowerEdge line of LiPo batteries at http://www.poweredgerc.com or by clicking their ad on the right. They offer a very wide selection of packs up to 5000 mAh capacity and as stated earlier, their prices are very reasonable considering the warranty and performance of their packs.

The PowerEdge RC LiPo battery pack used in this review was provided by PowerEdge RC and currently carries a retail price of $66.95 USD

PowerEdge packs are available from http://www.poweredgerc.com