Did I ruin My Lipo battery?

[Torq]

Hi all Im a new pilot and new here so here is my situation
 
 I have a small 4 channel electric heli. I have a 3 cell Li po battery.I came home flew the heli and had a nice long flight. Well not thinking I discharged the battery all the way down.

  I came back in to charge it. Now it seems to be taking forever to charge and when I flew after a charge I had about 45 seconds of usable flight power then the battery just looses power. It will run for a long time but it has no power now.

  Did I ruin the lipo by discharging it ?
  If it is messed up can I fix it or do I need a new one ?
  Thanks in advance
    Torq

[Turco]

Torq

sorry to hear that Yes is sounds like your batteries are junk now. Li-poly are not like nihm's you can not discharge them all the way down. you have to stop flying when they get to 3v under load per cell. you should have stopped flying your 3 cell battery when it went down to 9v under load. if your flying a micro heli it is hard because they will stay flying at 9 volts

you should have a good charger that tells you how much mah your putting back into the battery. you shouldn't discharge a battery past 80% capacity.  if you have a 1000mah pack you should only be charging back  800mah to make it full charge. you have to run some test flights to see how much your using like a 5 minute flight then charge. then maybe 7 minute and so on. with my micro's with a brushless motor on a 1200mah pack i usually stop flying at around 10-12 minutes. if you have a brushed motor the time will be a lot shorter.

they sell a lipoly warning light that you could install that will flash red when you get at 9v under load i have some and they work good. sometimes you can also set your ESC to give you a warning when you get to 9V under load.

you should read the Lipoly warnings also in this section it has a lot of good info. i hope you get a new battery soon and get back flying

[Torq]

 Thanks for the info! Yea its a micro I have other batteries but this is my first lipo. I ran across this page and saw the information too late. The instructions that came with the battery were little to none and the small 4 lines of rules that were poorly translated never mentioned any of the things you have covered. Also I have no indicators on the the charger for battery conditions. This accounts for a lot of the trouble I have had with the Lipo
 
   But live and learn. This is my first chopper and Id rather this kind of bungle than a major wreck which I have avoided up to this point. Im now working on the nose in hover. Ill just have to shell out the bucks for a new lipoly battery.