Loong Max 3S 800mah 20C versus Zippy 3S 800mah 20C

Written by Ashley Davis Friday, 06 November 2009 12:48

Comparison

So you bought a 200/250 class helicopter and now you are trawling the internet for that budget pack that's going to deliver performance at a bargain basement price. Two such packs that you might come across in your travels are the Zippy 3S 800mah 20C and the Loong Max 3S 800mah 20C. Both packs can be purchased for around £7 or $11 or less. The Zippy is also sometimes called a 'FlightMax', just for clarification.

Of course you may want to also check the shipping and import duties which can significantly up that cost. However, assuming you do manage to source from within your country of origin the pack prices on these two lipos are likely to be quite similar and far from burning a hole in your wallet or stressing your credit card to the limit.

Initially lets take a look at the two packs in question and their relative specification.

The test process

So, how are we going to test these two packs? Well it's the usual setup for a 'tuning' lipo test. The test is to be performed within the model, so no fancy dischargers placing completely unrealistic loadings on the pack, this is real world 'what does it do in the model'. The helicopter used for the test is my own T-Rex 250 which has an upgraded Scorpion motor and runs carbon blades all round. Of course we are going to control this test and not just fly around in the hope the packs are stressed in the same way.

The test consists of a 30 second run in idle up with 0 degress pitch on the blades, this is to get us past the initial extra power all lipos have at the beginning of the flight, I want to see what happens once you are past that and into the main body of the flight. At 30 seconds we introduce full positive pitch and hold it for 10 seconds, essentially this is the equivalent of a nice long climbout. This is followed by 5 seconds of 0 degress pitch to allow the lipo to recover and then we go into a full pitch pump with maximum positive and negative pitch for the last 15 seconds. Essentially we are mimicking a very badly controlled tic toc for this last section.

This is a comparative test of the battery, so headspeed is of little relevance, what we are looking at here is voltage, the higher the better the pack is coping.

Lastly I check pack temps after the test and if any pack is significantly hot (over 50 degrees C) I take a temp measurement.

This test does not encompass any cycle life measurements, it is purely a power / voltage test.

Results

For this test I had two Zippy 800s and a single Loong Max 800. The packs were tested one after the other with a suitable break inbetween for the motor and ESC to cool down. The Loong Max was tested in the middle, the Zippy's tested first and last.

OK, so lets take a look at the three charts on their own and lastly the size by side comparison. Bear in mind when looking at the charts that axis and scales of the charts are sized to fit, so the bottom voltage on one graph will not be the same as the bottom voltage on the next. I've included a side by side summary chart to highlight this.

The top of the chart shows the session is for the test.

Session1: Zippy
Session 2: Loong Max
Session 3: second Zippy.

The most telling chart regarding performance is the side by side comparison, here you can see the red amps are almost identical across the sessions, so the same loading was placed on each motor and the blue line is the voltage. The Loong Max is in the middle with a Zippy either side.

OK so that's the graphical bit, here in tabular form are the summary numbers from each test:

Taking a quick look at this analysis, the second Zippy is clearly a better pack than the first Zippy, so we will take the second Zippy as the best of the two and compare it to the Loong Max. First let's make sure our amp draws are close enough to do a fair comparison, the maximums are identical at 16.08A and the average across the 1 minute test is different by only 0.08A...... I think we are easily close enough to do a good comparison here.

Looking at the volts we can see significant difference, the Loong Max has a voltage minimum across the test of 10.27V versus the Zippy at 9.69V. Looking at the average across the test we can see the Loong Max averages at 11.15V versus the Zippy at 10.66V. Overall the Loong Max is roughly 0.5V higher across the test..... a superb result for Loong Max and a very clear win over the Zippy.

Conclusion

Clearly both these packs are at the budget end of the market, so we shouldn't expect blistering performance or superb voltage hold. However, it is clear that even at the budget end of the market there is quite a difference performance wise across the available packs. Of course at these prices you can afford to make mistakes and buy because it's a very cheap item and there's not much to loose but a little care can go a long way in securing a budget product with a reasonable performance.

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