iCharger 4010Duo Review

Everyone that is into RC needs a charger. There are many out there to choose from and the features and price range differ a lot. In this review I will share my impression of a high-end powerhouse called the iCharger 4010Duo .

My first impression when I picked the charger out of the box was the weight. It is a solid piece that weighs just over 1.5kg. Turning the charger over revealed the source of that weight, a huge aluminium heat sink which occupies at least half of the space inside of the charger. A great sign! Most cheap chargers use a small heat sink and loud fan spinning high RPM's to be able to cope with the heat. This charger ought to be able to pump a lot of amps before the fans need to kick in.

Now this charger is really not really just a charger, it's actually two chargers built into one body. Most dual or 4 channel chargers available in the market are capable of 50W per channel. That is fine if you own a lot of 3s2200's but if you charge a 6S battery they can only do it at 2 amps. The iCharger 4010Duo on the other hand is capable of 1400W per channel (or 2000W in synchronous mode). That is an insane amount of power!

Here are the specifications of the iCharger 4010Duo:

Now a lot of people will wonder what the heck you need that much power for. The answer is huge batteries and parallel charging. I charged 10 3S2200mAh batteries in parallel at 2C, which is 44A and the charger barely got warm. 10 3s2200mAh batteries fully charged in 30 minutes is amazing. Plus I was able to charge my transmitter battery on the other port at the same time. Very convenient. I also tried 8 6S 5000mAh batteries charging at 40A (1C), no problem at all. The charger is insanely powerful. Even at that kind of power the fans were very quiet. Much less so than the power supply powering the charger.

To be able to charge at such power levels you really need a big power supply. The iCharger 4010Duo is has an operating voltage of 9-50V DC, which is very impressive. I would highly recommend using a 48V power supply if you plan on charging at such high watts. Higher voltage means that it needs less amps to do the same work. To utilize the full potential of the iCharger 4010Duo you need a 2000W(!) power supply. Be sure that you have have that power supply plugged in to a high amp wall outlet so you don't trigger your circuit breaker.

The iCharger 4010Duo has 5 buttons and a click-able rotational dial for user inputs. The two buttons to the left control charge channel 1. The two on the right control channel 2 and the one on the top is used to "tab" between menu items. The dial is used to increase or decrease values as well as navigating the menus.

The screen is very clear and easy to read. The screen itself can be articulated which is a great feature as the optimum angle of the screen rarely is straight up.

The screen is in full color and has a good resolution. It's easy to read and present all information you need. The standard screen is the one shown above. It's displaying the two charge channels and the balance voltages.

When starting a charge this is the screen that first comes up. It's a list of presets. You can easily add your own and move stuff around. If you have a couple of battery types you charge often it's a good idea to add a preset for it.

When you choose the preset you want you can easily change the settings or just start charging. The menus are fairly logical and easy to navigate. I personally hate nearly all navigational interfaces of all chargers I've tried so far. This charger is no exception, but once you get used to what the buttons do, you'll understand the logic behind it and slowly get used to it.

The iCharger 4010Duo has some features I didn't expect to see in a charger. Like for instance a servo tester!?

You can test speed, run cycles and a bunch of crazy stuff. Pretty neat, but I'm not quite sure how often I'm going to use it.

The iCharger 4010Duo can also be pluggen into your PC via a standard miniUSB cable. This allows the user to update the firmware of the charger and also download the charge logs (yes it saves charge logs of each charge to a microSD card). Which is pretty geeky and can be very useful.

Servo ports on the side of the charger.

The output ports. I have to say that this is the best balancing charger I've used so far. It's very accurate and fast. It has the capability of balance discharging at 1.2A which is way more than most other chargers. This means it balances very quickly even when charging at high amps.

It also has ports for temperature probes, which is a great safety feature. If a battery gets to warm it automatically stops charging. It also has a built in temperature sensor to shut the charger down if it gets to hot.

The iCharger 4010Duo really is a ridiculously powerful charger. It's fairly easy to use. It's high quality. It's quiet and It has some pretty cool features. But it's definitely not a charger for everyone. If you have the need to charge big batteries fast or charge a large amount of batteries at ones this is definitely a charger I can recommend. But if you still havn't maxed out a 50W charger, this is probably not for you.

All in all a great product for the price!