poor Blade MCX battery lifetime

[dro178]

I got an eFlite Blade MCX micro heli 3 weeks ago and purchased 5 batteries for it which are the 110mAh Lipos that they sell for it (EFLB1101S). I have been using the charger that comes with the heli. Even though you can get about 6 1/2 to 7 1/2 minutes of flight time, I time my flights and stop at 6 minutes so as not to drive the batteries completely down each time. The heli does have a soft cutoff at 3V also.

I have 39 cycle on each battery and 4 out of 5 of the batteries have gotten so bad that you can only get a few minutes out of them now and the last one is on its way out also. The charger (supplied with the heli) actually charges the LiPos at 300mA which is a 3C charge rate and they are charged in 30 minutes. I suspect that this is what has resulted in such a poor battery lifetime. I called Horizon Hobbies about this and they would not deny that 35 to 40 cycles maybe all that you can expect from the batteries using the charger that comes with the system. To me, this was just rediculous to expect that you can only get 35-40 cycles out of the batteries though from what I know of any other LiPos, the number of lifetime cycles drops considerably at 3C charge rates. It seems rather poor to put a system out that has such a poor lifetime. At $10 a battery, I am not in a hurry to go out and buy another $50 worth of batteries if they only last 3-4 weeks again. Horizon's only words of wisdom were to buy a higher end charger that charges at 1C (110mA) if I want to get more battery lifetime!!!

Is anyone else having this issue with these batteries?

[Hinckley Bill]

Haven't had that issue yet, but it's already a bit of a pain to have to wait 30 minutes to recharge a battery at the 3C rate now using the 1C rate I'm supposed to wait 90 minutes, and all for a 6 to 8 minute flight?