Battery Water.

'83 Honda VT500C Shadow.

IN hot weather, the battery goes dry in about 500 miles.
To put in water, I have to take off the seat, remove the battery,
fill it, reverse the process. PITA.

It's my garage sale bike, so it does sit idling a lot while
I'm browsing. The battery does get a workout.

Anything I can do to reduce the water loss or make it easier to fill?
Clever fill gadget? Getting water to it ain't hard. It's telling
when to stop adding water that's hard.

Regulator is at 14.39V. Well within
the 15V max stated in the manual.
I'd crank it down a little if I had the option.

Ideas?
Thanks, mike

 

Why do you idle it like that? It doesn't do the bike any good, and probably
annoys everyone else.

All kinds of easy-auto fill gadgets for full size batteries. For lawnmower
batteries, not so much.

14.4? At idle? What's the voltage at cruise RPM? I bet it's way higher
than it should be. Any tendency to burn out a lot of signal lamps and such?
Unless your battery is a complete piece of crap, sustained overvoltage is
about the only way you're going to boil it dry in just a few hours.

 

How hot are you talking about? Anything over 120 degrees in the
battery area is deadly to lead acid batteries.

How old is the battery? Who was the manufacturer?

The best quality flooded cell lead acid MC battery is the Yuasa Sulf-
Stop model.

It has chemistry that attempts to prevent the lead plates from getting
plugged up with sulfur when the battery is discharged.

And that's what you're doing if you let your engine idle while you
shop at the yard sales.

Lead acid batteries are not filled with pure sulfuric acid, the
electrolyte is about 50% water.

When you add water to a battery which is low on water, and run a
current through the battery, it will mix with the sulfur and make more
electrolyte.

But if the sulfur has plated out on the lead plates, it just isn't
available to mix with the water.

So the electric current going through the battery just boils the water
off.

If you have a *small* hydrometer (the floating ball type looks like a
small turkey baster but dorsn't hold much fluid), attach a piece of
1/4 inch tubing to the nipple end. Punch a small hole crossways in
the tubing about 3/8th of an inch from the end.

Fill this device up with distilled water, put the tube into the
battery filler hole and squeeze the rubber bulb.

When you pump excess water from this device into the battery and
overfill it slightly, it will suck the extra water (and some of the
acid!) back out of the battery when you let go of the bulb.

That's why batteries were made with clear plastic cases for many
years. It's harder to tell what the electrolyte level is with the
translucent cases manufacturers have been using

Your best bet is to buy a sealed maintenance free battery.

And quit idling the engine so much.

 

Sounds like you haven't done the math.
Start a bike 50 times a day and something that was designed to
last for many years doesn't last nearly that long.


But that is irrelevant to

Good call.
Rerouting the sense line did drop the voltage.
Should know in a week if it fixes it.
All I gotta do is remember to charge it a few times
over the winter.

My jaw is getting tired from all the bubble gum I'm
chewing to keep this thing patched up.
If I could find a 500cc water-cooled, shaft-drive
bike, I'd buy a new one. they don't make 'em
like they used to.

thanks, mike







The problem is that

 

<Snip> and Krusty misses the problem again.

 

As others have said, if it's kicking out well over 14v at idle (which I
presume is where you measured it), it'll be kicking out more higher up
the rev range. Sounds like the reg/rec is dead and/pr the connections to
it are corroded and dying.

Never heard of the sense line thing, but I'll defer to Olson on matters
electrical.

If Mark's fix doesn't work, then you'll have to replace the reg/rec[1].
And replace the battery too.

[1] Just had to do this (well, under warranty, so the dealer did) on my
Ttriump Street Triples.

 

<Snip interesting stuff>

Thanks for that. Like I've said before, electrickery really isn't my
strong suit. I've only had four bikes (I think) over the decades with
duff charging sytems.

One was a Suzuki GS250 with a typically crap Suzy late 1970s-early 1980s
charging system and that fried the alternator and reg/rec.

Then there was a Suzuki TS250 dirt bike whose connections to the tiny
little solid-state reg-rec had corroded badly. The Yamaha 660 Tenere
which had the same ailment and died on the way back from last year's
Elefant, and was abandoned in Germany with a wonderfully cooked
alternator and wiring loom.

And finally, the modern Triumph whose reg/rec just surrendered after
2000 miles, and whose reg/rec has apparently been replaced with a unit
that "has greater longevity", according to the dealer. In other words,
the old one wasn't any good.

 

And move the regulator's voltage sense wire to the junction of the added
diode's anode and the regulator's output wire, otherwise the regulator will
just compensate for the diode voltage drop (if this causes the regulator to
become erratic, you may have to add an electrolytic capacitor at the same
point as the sense wire).

Seems to me it would make more sense to fix the fault properly rather than
bodge it and hope for the best.

14.4V should be regarded as the absolute max charging voltage, it would be a
good idea to check if it rises above that with the engine held at 5000revs
for a few minutes.

As someone else mentioned, cheap shitty batteries tend to gas off their
electrolyte for no good reason.

 

Hey, Peter Puffer!

Did ewe ever attend a military technical school that trained you to
troubleshoot and repair aircraft and missile electrical power systems?

I did.

Did ewe ever get paid to work on lead acid batteries full time?

I did.

Did you ever attend a civilian technical school that trained you to
operate high voltage power transmission and distribution systems?

I did.

Have you ever operated gasoline, diesel, steam and gas turbine power
generators?

I did.

Did you ever install a battery in a manned spacecraft?

I did.

Now tell me I don't know what I'm talking about, you slimey limey
cocksucker!

BTW, I guarantee that Mike, the OP, will be replacing his sulfated
flooded lead acid battery in the next 18 months...

 

Hey, Peter Puffer!

Did ewe ever attend a military technical school that trained you to
troubleshoot and repair aircraft and missile electrical power systems?

I did.

Did ewe ever get paid to work on lead acid batteries full time?

I did.

Did you ever attend a civilian technical school that trained you to
operate high voltage power transmission and distribution systems?

I did.

Have you ever operated gasoline, diesel, steam and gas turbine power
generators?

I did.

Did you ever install a battery in a manned spacecraft?

I did.

 

Of course you did.

 

*NO* manned US spacecraft has ever blown up on the launch pad/

 

Dd I say that? Nope. I just said that you'd missed the point. You hadn't
actually told him what to do or what was wrong (and if you think that an
idling engine causes a battery to sulphate, you're even stupider than I
thought, or cities would be full of stalled vehicles everywhere).

Not if he follows my recommendation and replaces it when he repairs the
fault that you missed... )

 

Utter utter shite as usual. I wont bother explaining the problem to
you as you aren't smart enough to understand a simple problem.

 

Right on cue Krusty the Klown (Kinko's perverted brother) starts in
with more lies.

 

False and Trueish...it could have blown up. If you'd have done your
job properly that fire would have never started.

 

Actually from what I've observed his is stupider than you can imagine.

Which is just good practice.

 

I wasn't even working on the project when the Apollo I tragedy
occurred, you goat goop gargler.

 

Cities aren't *obviously* full of stalled vehicles "everywhere"
because the vehicles
won't start in the morning because of a discharged battery and you see
a few tow trucks helping people get their cars started, or they get a
ride with a friend down to a service station to get their battery
charged or to the auto parts store and buy a new battery.

If you just idle your engine with the headlights on, the battery's
going to discharge.

If you then take your motorcycle home without riding it in an RPM
range that recharges the battery for a reasonable period of time and
park it in the garage without hooking up a Battery Tender, you'll wind
up with a sulfated battery.

Also, the OP didn't specify just hot it gets in the area he rides in,
but I went through a flooded cell lead acid battery every year when I
rode the desert a lot.

It was easily 130 degrees F around the battery, and my voltage
regulator was set for 14.5 volts.

Furthermore, I was buying the expen$ive Yuasa batteries, not the
cheapie Taiwanese crap.

Also, Mike asked how to accurately add water to his dehydrated battery
and I told him about the sideways hole in the bottom of the extension
tube on his hydrometer.

We used a set up like that in the battery shop where I got *paid* to
charge *hundreds* of lead acid batteries for the US Air Force.

The job involved walking up and down rows and rows of charging
batteries and turning up the rheostats on the manual chargers (1) and
adding water to batteries that hadn't finished charging and adding
*electrolyte* to batteries that had reached peak voltage.

The professional tool for adding water to a battery looked like an
enema syringe
with a sideways hole in the tube.

You insert the tube into the filler hole until it touches the top of
the plates.

When you release the bulb, all fluid *above* the sideways hole gets
sucked back into the bulb...

(1) It would have cost millions of $$$ to buy solid state battery
chargers in those days before transistors and silicon power diodes
were in common use. The manual battery chargers used some kind of
vacuum tube diodes, AIR...

 

No. It. Is. Not. Not unless you're driving some horrible old clunker
with a dodgy alternator and re-equipped with ex-Luftwaffe searchlights
for headlamps.

Where do you get this crap?