Battery ignorant

[babu]

I bought me an Odyssey battery as a replacement for the useless torchlight battery BMW equipped the GS with.

There are a lot of opinions about on how to charge batteries. But batteries seems to be poorly understood; not all opinions point in the same direction...

So, an ignorant - like myself - gets confused.

I have a cheap, small charger delivering about 0.5 amps. It will give some charge to the battery if given enough time, say overnight. Obviously the battery can be charged must faster and maybe my small charger won't be able to charge to full capacity. But these matters doesn't bother me. It does the job. The bike starts.

But... One question remains: Can my charger harm the battery?

My guess is no, it's to weak. But - what do I know?

 

[John Armstrong]

Personally, I prefer a low power trickle charger to the 4amps etc that some of the bigger chargers push out. As long as the charger is compatible with lead acid wet / dry / gel cell I can't see you're charger hurting the battery, as long as it goes into real trickle charge once the battery is charged. From memory it's called floating charge ie volts across the battery are maintained but no amps flow into it.

All IMHO, YMMV

BTW the alleged real killer is to have a charger that will desulphate the battery. Apparently it is this mode which the 1200 GS canbus and componenets don't like

 

[Mr K]

I have a Sept 04 1200GS on the original battery at 42,000 miles.

The battery cranked 'til it was almost dead when the FPC failed, then we by-passed the FPC and the bike chimed first thumb of the starter.

Weak battery?