CAN-bus for dummies
- Thread starter Alba
- Start date
But time for me to get on my high horse about optimates again.
Chuck them away... All they do is mask problems. If your battery needs an optimate connecting to your bike everytime you park up then it's faulty so change it. Even if you don't think it's faulty and you are just using the optimate to supposedly extend it's life then how will you ever know when it does go faulty? I'll tell you. The first you will know your battery is past its best will be when you are in the middle of a field or at a B&B after a night off the optimate.
I'd much rather change the battery every few years and go to bed with the confidence that the bike will start the next morning without relying on the optimate crutch. Save your £80 and put it towards replacement batteries you will probably never need.
Chuck them away... All they do is mask problems. If your battery needs an optimate connecting to your bike everytime you park up then it's faulty so change it. Even if you don't think it's faulty and you are just using the optimate to supposedly extend it's life then how will you ever know when it does go faulty? I'll tell you. The first you will know your battery is past its best will be when you are in the middle of a field or at a B&B after a night off the optimate.
I'd much rather change the battery every few years and go to bed with the confidence that the bike will start the next morning without relying on the optimate crutch. Save your £80 and put it towards replacement batteries you will probably never need.
Boris said:
my thinking exactly,
I never did get the need to keep them on charge all the time,
the only bike I ever did keep on charge was my daughters and that was just until I got round to stripping the alarm off it as it was draining the battery
hotbulb
Active Member
If the battery's been sitting idle for a year, it's probably very unwell anyway, and while regular use of an Optimate may keep it going for a little longer, its days are numbered.Alba said:
I like the Optimate as a charger;it's rather less of a "brute force"thing than a conventional charger, and so should help the battery to have a long and fruitful life. If the bike's been unused for a couple of weeks,a quick top-up from an Optimate is fine. But, if a battery has reached the sorry state where it needs to be connected to a charger regularly, then it's time to replace it (even if using an Optimate will keep it going a little longer). The battery wil let you down somewhere, probably somewhere cold, dark and damp!
:wales-emoticon-vlag:
jasonbc
New Member
I think everybody is missing the point of the optimate, yes they trickle charge and condition your battery but the main point is that with modern bikes having things stored in there memory, sleeping elctronics which are working with the bikes turned off like alarms immobilisers etc if you don't top them up when the bikes isn't being used when you come to use it the battery will be dead. A few years back about the only thing on a bike that drained power while the bike was oof was the clock or odometer. Also handy to have that extra bit of umph in the battery on a nice cold frosty winter morning before you set off
jasonbc said:
Nothing should be draining the battery on a modern bike even of you leave it for months. Yes some crappy poorly designed after market alarms may but with modern electronics that have high internal resistances and low switch currents there should never be any significant drain. The tiny battery in my watch is guaranteed to keep the clock ticking and hands moving for 10 years so why shouldn't a hulking great battery thousands of times as large not be able to keep a parked up bike is a sleepy state for a few months?
My GS with all its can bus electronics sat for around 3 months over winter and started right up without resorting to a optimate and that's on a bike with a big engine and relatively small battery?
Optimates are simply sticking plasters over deeper seated problems. Fix the underlying problem and you'll have no need to waste your cash on one.
jasonbc said:
I'm not saying don't have a charger. We all need them at some time or other but blindly plugging one in every night only masks other problems. If it was a leaky radiator you wouldn't just keep topping it to max on the bottle up every night. You would find and fix the leak.
Lutin said:
I absolutely agree. I would expect any normal drain to be in the very low mA or even uA and self discharge of the battery to be greater. Should still be able to go months without charge though.
Just say the power needed for idle systems is 1 mA (so 1 thousandth of an amp) The battery in my bike is small at 14Ah (or 14,000 mAh if you prefer)
So that would give me a theoretical life of 14,000 hours which is 583 days. Lets assume that a lead acid self discharges at 10% per month so month on month it looks like this
Jan 100%
Feb 90%
Mar 81%
April 72%
May 65%
June 59%
So by the end of June some six months later our battery is still at 60% capacity.
Ahh I hear you shout.. You forgot about all those 1milliamps dribbling out over theses months and you would be right and these would account for the equivalent of about 720mAh each month (so about 4 percent of fully charged capacity month on month) so again after 6 months that's another 24% gone.
So after 6 months we have lost 40% due to the battery self discharging and 24% due to electronics draw so we have about 36% left.
Enough to start the bike? Maybe just, but the figures for three months are 68% capacity left which should be more than enough.
Chewbadger
Active Member
Once a battery drops below 11v, sulphation starts on the plates. This can be dislodged by a battery conditioner which momentarily pulses 15v into the battery, or by keeping the battery above these limits.
Your charging system will never keep the battery at full capacity, so it will slowly lose CA over time.
Once sulphation takes place, the damage is done, and charging it will not bring the battery back to its former condition. Its overall capacity will be diminished, and will eventually cause a non start breakdown.
I see this regular as clockwork, and we test on every service at work. Even if the voltage is showing quite high, the ratio to cranking amps shows the over all condition and state of the internals.
Costs about £600 for a pair of batteries on a FH, still cheaper than a call out.
As Boris says, saves you in the long run.
Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk
Your charging system will never keep the battery at full capacity, so it will slowly lose CA over time.
Once sulphation takes place, the damage is done, and charging it will not bring the battery back to its former condition. Its overall capacity will be diminished, and will eventually cause a non start breakdown.
I see this regular as clockwork, and we test on every service at work. Even if the voltage is showing quite high, the ratio to cranking amps shows the over all condition and state of the internals.
Costs about £600 for a pair of batteries on a FH, still cheaper than a call out.
As Boris says, saves you in the long run.
Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk