So, all I really need is a car battery (charged), link it to my bike and le’s say in three months time, I recharge the car battery and connect them again and the car battery will act as my power source to charge the bike’s battery.
Am I right? it seems to be the easiest and most cost effective way to keep my bike battery alive over the winter.
to be honest, you might as well keep the car battery at home and topped up then take it to the garage and use it to jump start the bike battery when you need it
The easiest way to do it is like I said - lift up the seat, just unscrew the two battery leads - lift it out and bring it inside and attach it to a trickle charger - simple as fck.
I do this all the time - it’s a piece of p1ss - why make it so complicated?
- unless you have a Ducati - in which case they have probably put the battery somewhere stupid and inaccessible.
Not a big deal if the thing is going to be sitting for a month or two during the worst of the winter.
Yes that is the easy solution if you really do not want to take your bike battery out of your bike.
It is called connecting batteries in parallel, and is fine for re-chargable batteries of the same voltage.
Only point to watch out for…
If the bike battery is nearly flat and the car battery fully charged then the voltages will
be different and when you initially link them the current may be excessive and damage
one or both of the batteries. You could always put a resistor on one link, e.g. a 12v light
bulb, it shouldn’t even glow or even get warm once the batteries have settled to the
same voltage and would aviod possible excessive initial current.
Bad idea… jump starting/booster/rapid charging can damage lead acid batteries if done too much leave a lead acid battery discharged/flat for any length of time and you will have a sulphated battery which will not charge again if the bike battery is left to go flat, no bike alarm, and would need to reset the clock and possibly other stuff, which he’s trying to avoid by not taking the battery out of the bike
I really like the Parallel charging idea, it seems easy and cheap. I have been looking at this method and if you guys don’t mind me asking I just want to get a better understand how the car battery charge the bike battery as they both DC so how one transfer to another?
my understanding is for example the bike’s battery down to 9V and when I connect the car battery (12V) and now they become one big battery so the car voltage will float to the bike’s battery and level it to 10.5V each which mean I effectively charged the bike battery by 1.5V, then from that point onward they will go down at the same rate and because the larger car battery capacity it will least longer before it go flat. And let’s say in 3 months time I took the car battery out and charge it back to 12v and re-connect them again and the process will repeat itself and so on and so forth.
Am I correct?
Yes you’ve got it.
A good analogy is two water tanks, one large circumference the other small.
The tanks are side by side and the small tank is losing water slowly,
so it’s level is dropping. Now say you were to add a pipe connecting the
base of the two tanks, the water would initially flow quickly between
the tanks until the water level is the same in both. Then the water
level would continue to fall but much more slowly as the trickle leaves the
small tank and water flows from the large tank to the small tank via
the connecting pipe keeping the level the same in both tanks.