Hi Dennis,
My discovery has been that sometimes a narrowed prop will draw less current on the ground and almost eactly the same in the air. This has typically been in cases where I did exactly the same thing you did, by carving off the root trailing edge in a straight line from the knuckle in the APC prop to the mid span. in the wet series they used to sell a "butterknife" profile that did much the same.
Are you running at "idle" for the 30 seconds it takes to get to the handle? If not, then the change you made sure does save battery, as static current under governor mode is typically 140% of the flying current.
later,
Dean P.