well I pulled my 04 out of the garage since it's getting warm again in central CA and I thought I would start riding again. Guess what, the battery was dead. I didn't do anything to it in three months so it was expected. I tried filling the battery with distilled water and jumping it with my truck but it would not hold a charge. I bought a new battery and the guy at pep boys said that I needed to charge it before installing it. After filling it with acid I hooked it up to my truck with jumper cables for three hours. The truck was running and the battery was sitting on a chair. After installing back in the bike, the bike started up strong the first time. Has anyone ever broken in a new battery this way? I know I should have used a trickle charger but I just don't have one. How will this effect the life of the new battery?
Is this for real? Well the battery you just bought will probably last the season but defiantly not the way to charge a battery. Could have bought a small trickle charger for cost of running your truck for three hours. :o
Yea it's for real. Why not? I've read that the new battery needs an initial "boost" to break it in. The bike battery is 12 volts. my truck is 12 volts and the trucks charging system is 12 volts. If noting else, it was charged with no more than 14 volts due to the trucks charging system. BTW, the cost of letting the truck idle for three hours was only the cost of maybe a gallon of gas, far less than a battery charger.
Its a bit unorthadox but why should it cause any issues, I cant think of any. The alternator in the truck is charging the battery in the same way it would be charged by the bikes alternator and reg/rect if it had been flat and the bike had been jump-started.
Agree, it shouldn't cause any damage to a bike battery charging it that way. The possible damage in jumping a bike from a running car/truck is to the bikes charging system and not the battery because bikes frequently regulate to a lower charging voltage than the car/trucks do.
I have bought, filled, and installed many new batteries and then started the bike and taken a long ride to complete the battery charge over the years. A battery is about half charged after filling w/o charging and the bike usually starts with one click of the starter in warm weather. Danger to the battery in not completing the charge first is running the battery down completely dead trying to start it in cold weather. Bikes are hard enough to start in cold weather even with full battery voltage.
It actually shortens the life. I won't go into detail but here is a good introductory article from Yausa.
http://www.yuasabatteries.com/motor_battery.asp
Suffice it to say there is a charge-rate limit for the initial charge of a battery. Typically it is 10% of the maximum AMP-hour rating is the maximum that you want to charge at.
I believe that our batteries are about 14 Amp-Hour, so you would want to charge at less than 1.4 Amp at 13.5V. The issue with hooking it to a car is that the limit to the amount of charging current is the battery you are trying to initially charge. You are basically going to heat the battery up until it very warm, begin boiling some of the acid and forming sulfate crystals on the plates. A typical car battery has around 200+ amps of charging ability, that means that it basically charged the battery at the highest possible rate Initally.
Will it work fine for now, yes, will it last as long as a properly initially charged battery, no.
Here is another link that I think might help
http://home.jps.net/~snowbum/newbattery.htm
[EDIT] Here is Yuasa own document of charging of a new battery(Page 12)
http://www.yuasabatteries.com/pdfs/TechMan.pdf
[/EDIT]
I like the bottom of page 20 of the Yuasa Tech Manual better than page 12. :)
"Charging a New Standard Battery:
battery out of the box with only adding electrolyte is approx 80% charged...............recommendation is to charge....bringing to 100% before use................However, a long ride with a regulated charging system may also bring the batteries capacity to a higher level."
That's worked for me for years but I did pick up a 1 amp charger I now put on the battery for a few hours before installing. Probably better, particularly in cold weather where starting is harder.
I'm still not convinced one way or the other now about charging it with the running truck system like skyydiiver did. Car/truck systems taper off as they near full voltage feedback. Not sure what a 80% charged bike battery hooked in parallel with a fully charged truck battery would read voltage wise but I doubt he received more than a small % of the full amperage. Didn't mention any boiling or overheating of the bike battery.
The GS500 has a YB10L-B2 battery and the 10L would indicate a 10 amp hour battery but the specs say capacity is 11. Probably put more battery in same size package than they did years ago.
http://www.yuasabatteries.com/vehicle_search.asp
All interesting stuff, but the first 2 pages are just personal opinions and as such need to be taken at face value. The 3rd page is at least credible. What is not mentioned is the fact that it is being being charged by a regulated system, ie. one that senses, then provides and limits the charging voltage and current to exactly what the battery needs.....while its connected in parallel with the truck battery its not the sole source of electricity for the vehicle and as such is under negligable load. A regulated system allows the battery to take exactly what current and voltage, (within certain parameters) it needs to charge in much the same way as the most expensive and advanced mains powered chargers do........its not under heavy load, nor is it being trickle charged, taking days and running the risk of the electrolyte boiling off before it reaches full charge, nor is it having volts and amps "Force fed" into it by a high-rate charger and these are things that we are being told to avoid. The bottom paragraph of page 20 seems to suggest using a battery at 80% charge and them taking a long run is acceptable.
I can assure you of one thing though, if that battery at any time had 200A pushed though it you would have been able to measure its lifespan in seconds..... before watching it explode!!
Hey thanks for all of the replies. :) I can't say that it was right or wrong only time will tell. I rode the bike all day today doing errands in town with about 45 min total freeway time. The engine started up strong no fewer than a dozen times throughout the day. So far everything looks good. Just a note, before deciding to charge the battery this way I weighed every bit of knowledge that I had up to the point. The salesman and the included paperwork said that the battery needed an initial charge to ensure a long life. My truck battery is a 12 volt battery. Bigger but still a 12 volt. Knowing this and thinking about a cars charging system, I felt that my truck wouldn't put out too many amps to fry it since it doesn't fry the bigger one. While charging, every cell produced bubbles the entire time. The included paperwork stated that if a cell did not produce bubbles during the charging cycle, it was a bad cell and should be returned for exchange. The rate that each cell produced (tiny) bubbles was about a bubble every second. I monitored the temperature of the battery about every ten minutes by feeling the sides. The sides never felt any warmer or colder than the plastic lawn chair the battery was sitting on.
Sounds good to me! "Go forth and RIDE." :thumb: