Review: Maverick Professional Series 20

ACM Enterprises have been supplying their "Maverick" branded lipo packs for some years now, and they've always had a good reputation among FE racers here in the UK. Their latest offering is the "Professional Series 20", a range of hand-matched and assembled lipo packs. The pack under review here is a 2S1P 5000mah pack which retails for £67.99. So, there is a slight premium for the hand-matched packs in comparison to some of the cheaper brands of lipo.

Maverick Professional Series 20. This is a 2S1P 5000mah pack.

Matching

The matching process is similar to that used for NiMH cells. Cells are cycled individually, and packs are made from cells with similar characteristics in terms of capacity and behaviour under discharge, with the aim of producing a more efficient, longer-lasting pack that will, or should, give better usable capacity for racing. ACM also claim that their matched cells run cooler under discharge.

Each pack of Professional Series 20 comes with its own charge and discharge graphs from ACM, and with a six page Product Specification detailing all you need to know about the various QA tests the cells conform to.

Testing

Testing these packs will be done using a Schulze 10.36-8 charger for bench cycling, and an Eagletree data logger in a 2S Hydro 1-class boat to see how the pack performs for real in a racing boat. It is my intention, as with the other lipo packs I have, to graph these cells on a monthly basis to track degradation and performance loss.

Before we proceed, however, it should be made clear that ACM Enterprises supplied this pack to me for free, on the strict understanding that I publish a fair and balanced review. As Andy Karaolis of ACM put it, "If they're rubbish, say so - but they won't be!". So, to business.

Initial Impressions

The first test was simply to cycle the pack a few times, and produce an initial graph of pack performance under a 10 amp discharge on the Schulze, using Akkusoft, to get a baseline:

Initial discharge graph. Just under 5200mAh of capacity.

The next test is to run the pack in the boat and get some data from the Eagletree logger. But that's going to have to wait until the weather calms down! Check back soon.

UPDATE 1

Well, I've run this lipo pack a few times now in my Hydro 1 outrigger and the results are excellent. Compared to the Vislero 30C 5000mAh cell pack, the Maverick pack appears to have a little more punch, but, more importantly, the Maverick pack runs considerably cooler than the Visleros, which come out of the boat worryingly hot. I have some temperature "tell-tale" strips on each pack, and the Visleros at the end of a 5 minute run are off the scale (the scale maximum being 140 degrees Fahrenheit or 60 degrees Celsius), probably not far from the 160 degrees Fahrenheit maximum limit that Vislero quote on the label. The Mavericks in contrast are coming out at between 122 and 131 degrees Fahrenheit or 50 - 55 degrees Celsius.

So despite "only" being a 20C cell, the Mavericks seem to cope better with the current demands of Hydro 1 than the supposedly superior 30C-rated Visleros. I have to say I'm impressed with the Mavericks - they certainly seem to be a higher quality cell than the Visleros. Once I've had a few more runs I will run this cell pack through Akkusoft again and generate another chart for comparison. I should also mention the cell matching - you don't get much warning that the boat is about to stop; voltage drop is very abrubt, usually a sign of a well matched pack.

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Last modified: 08th July 2010 @ 09:06