Yet another Lipo charging/balancing question

[BrianG]

One of these days, I'll get all this straight! In the meantime, I hope you all can bear with me?

I was looking around at the various chargers and balancers and thought of something. Let's say I am charging a 5s pack and the battery is almost charged so the charger is in constant voltage mode. Then one cell goes out of balance. The balancer is supposed to disconnect the one cell to keep from overcharging, right? But what happens to that extra voltage from the charger? It was charging 5 cells, but if one is disconnected by the balancer, now it's charging 4 cells. So, does that mean that ~20v now gets split across 4 cells instead of 5 (resulting in "bad" things)? Of course, this is not an issue for the TP 1010 due to the feedback link, but what about the other brands out there?