D6
Registered user
cleaver as in meat?
battery discharge
- Thread starter bart2181
- Start date
cherokee
Registered user
Is it me or is there some kind of weird fasination with having a battery on charge 24/7,my bikes been in the garage since october,theres no electric there so i just go start her up once a week and all is well,today i fired her up and went for a 30mile ride and put her away again.Im thinking alot of these batteries are getting cooked hence maybe why they are fcuking up?
Cookie is right. We used huge banks of lead-acid wet cells on the old diesel electric submarines, they were either floating on a charge(no pun intended), or discharging to provide power for propulsion and auxiliary systems. thats a LOT of amps. The batteries were installed for years (although they were extremely well cared for) and went through a lot of repeated heavy charge-discharge cycles.
The same is true for a lot of UPS systems and conversion machinery which have huge banks of wet cells on a constant floating charge. They don't die through the constant charging process.
The same is true for a lot of UPS systems and conversion machinery which have huge banks of wet cells on a constant floating charge. They don't die through the constant charging process.
Motorhomers and boat owners (I am an 'ex' both of these) do a lot of fretting about lead acid batteries and there's a lot written about battery management in these fields, but they are simple to use and manage if you are kind to them.
The killer for a lead acid battery is not charging it - leaving them in a discharged state for any length of time causes them to sulphate, as does heavy discharging (regardless of the type of lead acid battery - 'deep discharge' batteries are mostly snake oil - they just have heavier plates to cope with the heating in heavy use). Multi stage chargers are good for taking care of your battery, but don't believe the 'de-sulphating' rubbish they all talk about - commonly regarded as snake oil. It's also harder to fully charge a gel battery fully, but some of their advantages outweigh this disadvantage.
The two golden rules for maintaining a healthy lead acid battery are:
Use the right charge rate (i.e. the correct rate for the type of battery - very different for wet cell and AGM / gel batteries - a decent multi stage charger should take care of this)
Don't use more than 50% of it's rated capacity i.e. for a 19Ah battery, don't use more than 9Ah of juice (I guess this was the case in subs Pukmeister?). This is the killer on a bike, because we don't have the space to store a big enough battery. Hence we nearly always end up torturing our batteries through over discharging through multiple staring loads and a shed load of electrical accessories. This is why they end up a consumable item on a bike.
The killer for a lead acid battery is not charging it - leaving them in a discharged state for any length of time causes them to sulphate, as does heavy discharging (regardless of the type of lead acid battery - 'deep discharge' batteries are mostly snake oil - they just have heavier plates to cope with the heating in heavy use). Multi stage chargers are good for taking care of your battery, but don't believe the 'de-sulphating' rubbish they all talk about - commonly regarded as snake oil. It's also harder to fully charge a gel battery fully, but some of their advantages outweigh this disadvantage.
The two golden rules for maintaining a healthy lead acid battery are:
Use the right charge rate (i.e. the correct rate for the type of battery - very different for wet cell and AGM / gel batteries - a decent multi stage charger should take care of this)
Don't use more than 50% of it's rated capacity i.e. for a 19Ah battery, don't use more than 9Ah of juice (I guess this was the case in subs Pukmeister?). This is the killer on a bike, because we don't have the space to store a big enough battery. Hence we nearly always end up torturing our batteries through over discharging through multiple staring loads and a shed load of electrical accessories. This is why they end up a consumable item on a bike.
