I managed to drop my 4S battery cell voltages way below 3.0 volts. Do you think the LiPo should now be thrown to carbage box or should I still try to charge it?
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I managed to drop my 4S battery cell voltages way below 3.0 volts. Do you think the LiPo should now be thrown to carbage box or should I still try to charge it?
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Do you like your house, car or other place where you charge to be a fire free, non-scorched zone?
All bets are off when you charge that battery if you even can. Good battery chargers make you plug into the balance ports and detect each cells voltage so they will not charge that battery. Bad battery chargers ignore the balance port and just see the series battery. Even those might say the voltage is too low. What also happens in LiPo batteries is the low cell just becomes a dead short. OK, in and of itself bad, but when you go to charge with a series (non-smart balancing) charger that just looks at the series of cells and you tell it 4 cells but you are charging 3 because one is dead, the other cells see higher voltage and then burst into flames. Murphy says this happens right after you walk away from the charger thinking all is OK.
That said, I had a pack like this. What I first attempted to do was charge the bad cell at a very low rate via the balance port using this http://adafruit.com/products/259 single cell USB charger. The cell died as a dead short later and my only choice was to make the pack a 2 cell (mine was a 3s) by removing the bad cell. I did this "test" charge attempt under supervision in a fire proof container. I still regret it because it was a waste of my time (the cell was dead anyway) and very dangerous.