My Q-500 is about 5 years old now. I am still using the original battery's (3) but they are old and I am only getting 10-12 minutes out of them.
My question is would you buy a after market battery for this drone or would you get one from Yuneec? I am concern about company having these on the shelf
for a while and they won't last long or if they never been used it doesn't matter ?
i can only speak as a TH480 owner (I also own a P2V+).
I recently purchased a third party battery but I was a bit apprehensive about it. I would have much preferred the Yuneec brand given the choice, but Yuneec TH batteries are like hen's teeth in the U.K. at the moment. I received this battery a little over a week ago and have flown it twice now. I gotta say that I'm very impressed by it and it exceeds my expectations.
In contrast, I once bought a third party battery for my P2V+ and that was just a power pack of cr'ap. It started to go bad almost from the word 'go'.
So I suppose that based on my experiences of third party batteries all I can say to answer your question is...It depends. There's no really good answer. Some are good, some are bad. But remember that just because it says 'Yuneec' on the battery doesn't necessarily say that it's a good battery.
LiPo batteries begin to deteriorate as soon as they come off the production line and with LiPo batteries age does matter (as well as how they've been stored) even if they've never been used. The best indicator of a battery's overall health is it's Internal Resistance. Low resistance indicates a healthy battery. But you can't check the resistance until after you've bought it so that's a 'catch 22'.
In conclusion, then, I'd say that buying any battery, whether it's branded Yuneec or not, is always gonna be a bit of a gamble. The best advice I can give you, then, is for you to buy a battery from a company that has a good returns policy should that battery not be a good one. It's largely down to the luck of the draw.
