Battery Maintenance for Public Safety Drones

[alepine]

Greetings everyone,

New to this Forum and newish to drone tech.

To get straight to the point, I am a drone operator and responsible for our drone program at my fire department. This is fairly a new program and I've been trying to find a balance in maintaining our batteries and being mission ready. We fly the Matrice 30T.

The problem I'm seeing is the research I've done is that you shouldn't keep your batteries charged at 100% all the time. Our charging dock has the option to maintain the batteries at 50% which is the default "storage" mode. Saying that when we get deployed, the batteries are only half charged giving us half the flight time.

I'm curious to see how other agencies or drone hobbyist, manage this dilemma? Is it as simple as just maintain them at 100% all the time and replace the batteries more frequently?

Appreciate it!

 

[phph001]

I run a Tesla, so this discussion comes up in forums at regular intervals. The general line is that the battery lasts longest if it is cycled between 25 and 75%. Storage at 100% is bad but it does no real harm if the battery is put to use shortly after a 100% charge.
The question then is how often are you likely to need a full charge? You must have at least one spare battery, so you could set up an administrative system whereby one battery is always on charge, one is fully charged and will be the next one used, and one is being discharged to 75% for storage. If you can get an electronics technician to set the default value on your charger to 75%, so much the better

 

[Brutalwarpig]

Greetings everyone,

New to this Forum and newish to drone tech.

To get straight to the point, I am a drone operator and responsible for our drone program at my fire department. This is fairly a new program and I've been trying to find a balance in maintaining our batteries and being mission ready. We fly the Matrice 30T.

The problem I'm seeing is the research I've done is that you shouldn't keep your batteries charged at 100% all the time. Our charging dock has the option to maintain the batteries at 50% which is the default "storage" mode. Saying that when we get deployed, the batteries are only half charged giving us half the flight time.

I'm curious to see how other agencies or drone hobbyist, manage this dilemma? Is it as simple as just maintain them at 100% all the time and replace the batteries more frequently?

Appreciate it!

I fly large custom drones that use large 25,000mAh batteries. My solution is to keep one battery charged and the others on a storage charge level. If I think I will need more than one battery, I start charging one of the storage batteries as soon as I know that I will be flying that day. I have a fast charger that can bring the battery from 50% to 100% in about 45 minutes. 45 minutes is about how long the first battery will last before having to swap batteries, so this works pretty well. Bottom line is batteries have a given life span and replacing batteries is just part of owning/operating a drone.