Are there any alternatives to Turnigy or Zippy ?

[EBJ]

So obviously Hobby King LiPo seems to be the cheapest,
but I was just wondering if anyone is using something other than that ?

I noticed the Hyperion LiPo claims a much better quality-control, w/ a failure rate of only 1 in 1000 cells.
And that's apparently after 300+ cycles.
http://media.hyperion.hk/dn/g3lipo/

(that's about 10X better than people seem to be experiencing w/ HK LiPo)
granted they cost about 2.5X as much.

What say you ?

[neptronix]

Hobbyking RC Lipo still remains one of the best values. you may save a buck or two going with 'gens ace', 'sky lipo' etc. But those are rarely used.

Ha, Hyperion RC Lipo. Here's the rub about the hobbyking packs. You're gonna get a dud cell in 10%-15% of the packs you order. If you pay 2-3 times as much money, you are really losing out. Maybe you'll only get a 2-5% dud rate? Maybe you get slightly higher 'real world' discharge ( 20C is good enough for most!! )?

So maybe 10% better at 2-3 times the cost.. i don't see how someone could justify it.

[dogman]

Yeah, HK has a fairly high dud rate. In my case a batch of 4s packs were all dead by two weeks. Couple cycles and puffed like mad. But not one dud out of the other 20 packs I've bought. Still cheap despite a few duds. In general, a dud shows itself fairly quick, so once you sort the good ones out, you can count on them for some time.

Unless you go kill em.

Let's not dwell too much on the other packs I noobishly killed. There's the real failure rate, my failure to learn not to short the leads. Took awhile, but I stopped kff ing. Since I got started, some better foolproof wiring harnesses got invented.

The smart set just buys 9 packs to make an 8 pack bike battery. One thing though, you really must sort out the duds before you start doing anything permanent. It's one of the reasons my lipo setups are deliberately non permanent. Any wonky pack is sorted out and replaced with a good one in about 10 seconds.

[neptronix]

Out of 28 packs i ordered, 25 of them are perfectly good. I've been very good with their care, even shorted 1 pack pretty badly and it lived. I am still using the packs i ordered almost 2 years ago. To my shock, all cells still are within 8mV of each other down to 3.6v

Yeah, always order 1 extra if you are going to get a lot. This actually goes for every formulation of lithium battery ( even big $$$ stuff ). The production of lithium batteries is still not an exact science.

[Ypedal]

My 1st dive into the HK world with 20C turnigy cells was less than great, 2 years later i got another shipment that was 100% good, last year another was 100%, this year i have 2 shipments on route, one being Nano's from the US warehosue and the other from china....

The original batch had cells dead on arrival, some i was able to re-vive and use.. but on the 2nd year they quit and i retired them... the cells that arrived in good condition are still working ( 3rd year ) and performing well allthings considered.

If i needed to run a 5ah pack at the full 20C rated output, i'd get the high end quadruple pricetag cells, but i dont need that.. the 25C cells + from HK are arriving in good shape.. might be a fluke or a pattern.. not determined yet.

[chilledoutuk]

generally with HK packs you get a dud rate as mentioned but also the purity of the materials they use is not as good hence the Self Discharge of the cells is generally higher.
Also the shelf life of HK packs is not up there with High quality lipo packs made by people like enerland and kokam.

you may save a buck or two going with 'gens ace', 'sky lipo' etc. But those are rarely used.

Initial cost HK packs are normally much cheaper but in the long run gens ace and other higher quality lipos will work out cheaper. You get what you pay for TBH.

In my opinion since Gens ace cells have been very well received by the RC community which generally tend to go though lipo packs a lot quicker than us ebikers I would say that if you can get gens ace cells for a good price they will be a great alternative to HK's packs.

Also if you can find volton cells for a good price they are made by enerland and thus would also be a high quality alternative to HK cells.

Also i would like to say when buying quality cells its rare that you get duds unless they were damaged in the post.