On Dec 30, 2010, at 1:38 PM, Bob Graham wrote:
>
> Hmmmm. That's interesting. My experience has been just the
> opposite; I leave my battery tender constantly connected to the
> battery in my motorcycle and neither the Battery Tender or the
> battery has ever failed in nearly four years of use. In fact, it's
> the original battery that came with the bike. I may have just
> jinxed myself here...
>
> Bob
> Little Elm, Texas
>
>
Say Folks,
(reply is in reference to all the recent discussion about chargers).
The advice about not hooking up a small charger to a battery 100% of
the time (from my experience) was based on the "trickle charger"
designs. They force current into the battery whether it wants to
accept it or not, overcharging them and boiling out the aced on wet
cell batteries. I lost a few to that problem back in the 80s when I
used to eat a battery every year on each bike.
The whole point of the "tender" concept is that once the battery has
reached full charge the charger would switch to a "float" mode and
only give current when the battery could accept it and in that way
maintain the battery at an optimum charge level.
So it should be obvious that if the tender type charger (nearly all
chargers have this design now) would revert to a trickle charger type
if the monitoring circuitry went bad or was out of spec.
I'm just now getting set up with a new battery vendor and they sell
their own branded chargers so I will double-check from their
perspective and check with the main distributor I work with.
But I do think that if you are having problems with batteries being
short lived when they are kept on a tender type charger the charger
should be looked at.
And keep in mind that a few batteries need specific profiles to their
charge curves (there are 3 steps to the charge curve on tender type
chargers) and if you use a charger with a less than optimum curve you
will not get the full life from the battery. Odyssey batteries need a
different curve than Westco etc.
The reason tender chargers are important is that modern bikes all have
ECUs which have a parasitic drain in that they are pulling current off
the battery when parked unlike carbed bikes which usually do not have
a drain unless you've added something like a clock or voltmeter etc.
Thanks,
M./
Michael Heth
mheth@motolectric.com
(415) 992-7840
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