I posted this in another thread
The way I understand it, when you start a charge cycle, your LiPo charger is just dumping energy into the battery through the larger "discharge" leads. The ones with the EC5, or XT connector, or whatever. You hear of racers charging at 30 or 40 amps. The balance leads would not take that constantly. So the discharge leads are also handling the charging.
Once one single cell reaches 4.2v (or 4.35v for high volt LiPo's), the charger stops charging at the higher amperage you have selected and goes into balance mode.
During the balance cycle, the max amperage your charger can charge at will only be what the charger's balance circuitry can handle. The
Hota D6 Pro for example has 1.6A balance current capability. What this is basically, is how much amperage the internal resistors can pull. Most budget chargers have a 1A balance circuit. Your SkyRC S65 has a .35A balance circuit. So once in balance mode, your charger will become painfully slow.
Once in balance mode, the charger is still charging each cell through the discharge leads, but it is drawing the extra voltage out of the full cell(s) through the balance leads and burning that energy up through internal resistors.
That is why the balance circuitry capability is so limited. It can only discharge at the amperage the internal resistors can handle. So you might start at 5A, but your battery will finish charging at 1.6A. If it didn't do that it would burn itself up trying to get rid of all that energy that fast.
As for the discharge function, that is used if you want to discharge the battery down to a specific voltage. Handy for sending batteries to their doom. As said, use the storage mode to put your cells at 3.85v or so per cell.
It will take a long time to drain them from 4.2v/cell to 3.85v/cell because the charger basically has to use resistors to drain that voltage off. It will just turn it into heat. You'd have more fun taking an RC out for a rip to drain your batteries.
