[Kiwi]

Canardman.

How hot is hot. Burn the fingers hot or just super warm to the touch. If your using a freshly charged battery pack your turning some 2.4 volts into heat. If you were to lower the output from 6 volts to say 5 volts your dumping 3.4 volts and that regulator is going to be even hotter.

I have seen these regs get hot with large battery packs fully charged. But dont panic.

Set up a voltmeter in the battery circuit before the regulator and turn your model on. Waggle servos, do what ever you can and run it for 20 minutes or so. Then when your pack voltage has settled to around about 7.6 volts or such touch the regulator again and see if its running cooler. It should.

If your concerned about an after regulator load then I suggest you look for a pwer meter or something that reads volts, watts, amps etc in line and real time. You can find them at Eagle Tree, Medusa research etc and they are really invaluable when it comes to setting up your planes.

As a rule of thumb with a model on the bench and everything running I look for a neutral current draw of less then 200 Milli Amps. Any more than that indicates servos fighting each other, maybe a bad servo pot or a sticky flying surface.

If you have a good setup you can have the no load current draw as low as 100 MaH.

But first step mate would be run that battery pack down a tad to the operational; voltage and see what gives. Another one is raise the regulator output to 6.5 volts so you get the output voltage closer to the input voltage. The lower the difference the less heat you will produce.

Hope this helps some.