Unlucky with Batteries ?

[pomm001]

I bought a new battery for my GS,from memory it was an Exide , fitted it and all was well. I was doing some work on the bike over last winter so took the battery off and stored it the house. Went to put it back on last April and it would not take a charge, it had sulphated up. As it was only 10 months old i took it back to the shop and after a lot of umming and Arhhing I made them do a discharge test which showed two cells out, they gave me the benefit of the doubt and replaced the battery with a new Yusa.

Have just taken the bike off the road a couple of weeks ago, bike plugged into optimate , my son unplugged it to use the plug for something else and and didn't plug it back in , so stood for two weeks re-connected optimate and it didn't want to know, volt meter read 7 volts , plugged in my car charger which has 'bike' setting 2 amps and left it over night , let it rest for 12 hours and plugged optimate back in, this time it started to charge , but still wont get above 10 volts
The bike does not have an alarm fitted , will do a drainage check soon
am i just unlucky or can someone suggest a probable cause

 

[ahutcheon]

Sounds like bad luck to me, although checking for unexpected drainage (on the bike or even via the Optimate just in case that's gone faulty) is probably worthwhile just in case. Are you afflicted with space aliens or poltergeists? Even if the second battery was run flat by an unexpected draw over two weeks I'd have thought it would have perked up on the charger (albeit probably not to "as new" performance), and the first one has to be crap luck unless it died before it came off the bike.

 

[rce]

Does your optimate indicate the battery state when only connected to the bike, mine does by LEDs and if the mains was off this would kill the battery over a couple of weeks.

 

[Steptoe]

I bought a new battery for my GS,from memory it was an Exide , fitted it and all was well. I was doing some work on the bike over last winter so took the battery off and stored it the house. Went to put it back on last April and it would not take a charge, it had sulphated up. As it was only 10 months old i took it back to the shop and after a lot of umming and Arhhing I made them do a discharge test which showed two cells out, they gave me the benefit of the doubt and replaced the battery with a new Yusa.

You're a lucky man - A battery guarentee is to cover manufacturing faults. There were no manufacturing faults with your battery, it failed due to operater/maintenence error.

 

[wessie]

Does your optimate indicate the battery state when only connected to the bike, mine does by LEDs and if the mains was off this would kill the battery over a couple of weeks.

Yes, mine does this too as it is an early version of the Optimate. I noticed it one day when we had a power cut as the LEDs on the Optimate were glowing. Also, whenever power is resumed, the early Optimates do not resume the charging cycle, they just sit there draining your battery. you have to break the connection to the battery & mains socket to restart the process.

Anyone with an Optimate 3 or 4 won't suffer this problem as they put in a fix for these versions.

In answer to the original post: check your bike charging system. If the regulator is damaged in a Honda CBR kind of way then you may be over-charging the battery and damaging it by overheating it. 3 dead batteries in a short time is usually symptomatic of such a problem.

 

[warmshed]

Optimate 4 is better, the update has cured a few charging bugs and worth the extra cost.