I bought two Traxxas rc cars in the past 12 months for two of my sons. One battery was a lipo and the other a nimh. I didn’t use either one more than 5 times. They sat over the winter for a few months and now neither will charge. I bought two new nimh batteries and they charge just fine.

Are Traxxas batteries really that shxxty and short lived?

In short, it depends.

Nimh are pretty robust.

If the lipo was stored charged or over discharged it is dead.  Pretty much any lipo.

On the upside, Traxxas batteries are also overpriced.

For the nimhs, charge, drain and repeat. They will drain almost immediately.They should cycle back to life. You will start to see them lasting longer, then they are back to normal. Happens to me when I quit using them for months at a time.

Lipos can not be stored dead. Storing them fully charged is not good either. Store them 40-80% charged. Some have a protection board built in that can slowly drain them over time.

If your NiMH will not charge it is probably because the voltage is too low for the Traxxas Smart charger to ID the battery and the charger will not allow you to start a charge cycle.

You need a simple DC voltmeter and a non Traxxas NiMH charger. Use the simple charger to get the voltage up to about 1 volt per cell and then switch the battery to the Traxxas Smart charger to finish the charge.

To prevent the over winter and not charging charge your NiMH batteries every month in wintertime.  And to prevent the problem in the future change batteries before they are about 1 volt per cell.

Once you recover a NiMH battery run it to discharge it then repeat this 4 to 6 or more to get the battery to deliver full capacity.


Lithium battery possible recovery method next post

Great point. What charger do you have? If its a Traxxas ezpeak, it can be put into manual mode . Thats how I charge my non traxxas batts with an adapter.

Sounds like you didn't properly store/maintain them.

I have some luck with recovering Li batteries that have been over discharged. If the cell voltages are just below 3.0 VDC you can try charging them as a NiMH on a dumb charger until the voltage rises to where a Li charger can recognize them.

Safety equipment required: leather gloves, pliers, wire cutters, metal or ceramic plate or bowel, planed route to out doors if things go wrong. Voltmeter and charger.  

If the battery goes into exothermic destruction cut the battery wires use leather glove to put battery in bowl etc use pliers to move the battery to the outdoors and let it burn out.
 
Absolute safety rule: no unattended charging in NiMH or Li mode. Hold the battery in your hand so you can detect any premature rise. Watch each cell voltage on a Li battery charger. Traxxas and Venom both make good ones that are well calibrated.  If any cell has an different reaction than the others in the pack STOP charging. Figure out why the anomaly and correct as necessary.

Sometimes I have had to resort to charging an individual cell to get it balanced with the other cells.

Continue until you can get the battery to start a Li charge cycle.  

If all of the battery deities are smiling you may get a usable battery BUT that battery will never be as good as one not subjected to this kind of abuse.  At worst you need to buy a new battery.

I an a BioMedical Imaging Engineer retired after 35 years and a hobby shop owner for 54 years. I work on battery packs, build them etc on almost a daily basis. Only had 1 or 2 Li batteries destroy them selves while on the repair bench since Li became available.

I have both the ez peak charger and the nimh charger with the a/c adapter. Tried charging them both multiple times with no luck. I ended up buying two new batteries. I got nimh. Hopefully these fare a little better.

LiPo is far superior.

You just have to charge and store them properly.

Traxxas batteries have a one year, full warranty, and a 50% replacement warranty after that.   Contact customer service, they should help you out

This and I leave them on the charger, for days.
some larger ah batteries would take 3 days to see anything.

then good

I did contact support. There is no warranty on batteries.

They just did one for me in January, it was 11 months old.  Full replacement, just had to ship them the old one

Is that new?

I have had two traxxas replacements done on batteries, both lipo, one purchased online, one from a hobby shop.

I guess. They told me no warranty. They offered to check them and confirm if they were bad if I mailed them in. No thanks.

Storage charge Lipos

I feel lucky.  I've had my Traxxas Stampede for several years and the factory battery still takes a full charge and works great.  I never expected it to last this long just because I've never had rechargeables that lasted more than a year or two.

Are you using the crummy Traxxas charger? If so...get a better Lipo charger. A friend of mine had some Traxxas Lipo batteries that would not charge on his Traxxas charger.....if the voltage per cell gets to low, it won't even try.  My charger (don't remember the name off hand) was able to run a "repair cycle" on them and get them back in good working order.

Those Traxxas chargers are pretty junky.....

As much as I dislike Traxxas, that isn't a bug, it is a feature.  Any lipo pack discharged below a certain frequency is dead or likely soon to puff and should not be used.