How to Increase Quadcopter Flight Time

There is a good chance that there are more efficient batteries available now than the ones you got delivered with your quadcopter. The manufactures are continually improving the batteries. You will need to look for the same type of battery that you got with your drone, but with higher mAh will make the battery run longer.

Batteries that get much more than just warm (105F or so) are being permanently damaged. Unrecoverable damage starts at 115F or so and the higher it goes the more damage there is. Too hot to hold onto is about 130F for most people.

And you are putting the pack at risk of puffing, rupturing, and even bursting into flame. If they are puffed now, you need to be very careful when charging them to make sure they don't over heat. A healthy battery taken down to 80% of it capacity will usually take a little more than 80% on recharge. As a battery ages the recharged capacity will get smaller and smaller and the battery will drop to the 3.7-3.8V under load more quickly. A develops all the aging and used up symptoms more quickly.

If your Gens ace 4s 2200 mAH battery will give you 80% of usable capacity you can use 1760 mAH out of the 2200 that is supposedly there. So your available capacity would be:

1760 mAH = 1.76A
1.76A x 60 = 105.6 Amp/Minutes

At a 32A discharge rage your flight duration would be:

105.6 / 32 = 3.3 minutes (3 min 18 seconds)

So guess what? You've been beating that battery up pretty hard if you flying it for 5 minutes..

Two batteries in parallel will give you the capacity of both batteries and they will both share the load so the C rate would drop in half from the above if it was the same batteries. It would be best if the batteries were the same capacity and even better if they were same brand and bought at the same time.

If you keep an eye on the pack temperatures and amount of capacity that is put back when you recharge it will do a lot for battery life. Keep the recharges down around 80% or so. And checking the pack voltage immediately on landing will tell you a lot. If you land and find the cells at 3.8-3.9V 10-15 seconds later, you were most likely down to 3.7 or less under load.

A battery taken down to 3.7V while under load is 80% discharged and that should be the end of it's day. And it should not be more than warm then either. If you land with a battery at 3.7-3.8V and shut down it will start recovering immediately and may be back up to 3.9V or 4.0V within minutes. But it is still depleted. If you run the motors up the voltage will drop immediately.

Everyone needs a watt meter so see load on their battery and how the battery is doing as far as dealing with the load. If you really want to know what is going on a data logger like the eLogger can be flown to see what is going on. The image is the eLogger data from a flight, the red line is the battery and you can see how the voltage falls as the flight proceeded.

The flight was a stable hover, then three full throttle punch outs, then a few circuits of fast forward flight, then a brief hover and landing. The red line is the pack voltage. The 3S lipo battery 5000mah pack was down to 11.15V at the lowest point and that is your 3.7V quitting time. The voltage recovered a little as he back off on the throttle, hovered, and landed.