got our T40 setup running earlier this spring and the battery life is noticeably shorter than what DJI advertises. like im getting maybe 7-8 minutes of actual spray time per battery in operational conditions and i know the spec says up to like 17 minutes but i also know thats under ideal conditions with a light payload so i wasnt expecting to hit that. but 7-8 feels really short, were losing a ton of time swapping batteries and it's kind of killing our efficiency on larger fields.

ambient temps have been around 15-20 celsius so its not a cold weather thing. tank is being loaded to around 30L which is below the max. the only thing im wondering about is whether our nozzle configuration is affecting it somehow ? we're running the standard flat fan setup that came with it. also the batteries are relatively new, only have maybe 40 cycles on them.

anyone tuned their operation to get better real-world flight times or is this just the reality of running a heavy lift sprayer and i need to adjust my expectations

7-8 minutes at 30L payload actually doesn't sound that far off to me, the T40 burns hard when its fully loaded and flying at operational speeds. the 17 min figure is basically empty tank, favorable wind, optimal altitude, the whole thing. in real field conditions with full or near-full load you're always going to be way below that. what matters more is your liters per hectare rate and how many hectares youre covering per battery not the flight time itself ? if the coverage rate is where it should be youre probably fine even if the clock number feels low.

that said, 40 cycles is still pretty early, batteries usually havent fully settled into their capacity curve yet. id do a full discharge/charge cycle intentionally and check the DJI app for the battery health percentage. also check if you have any firmware updates pending, there was a power management update a few months back that some people said helped a bit.

yeah this drove me nuts when we first got ours too. the advertised numbers are pretty much useless for real planning purposes. we ended up just timing 10 actual field runs with our typical load and route and built our logistics around that average. pre-positioning spare batteries closer to the field helped way more than anything else ? the swap time was killing us more than the actual flight time if im honest. also worth checking that your RTH battery threshold isnt set too conservative, ours was defaulting back really early and we had a lot left on landing.