Jumped on the Breva tonight, turned the key and…nothing! No twitchy needles, no idiot lights, nothing!
Battery terminals tight.
Fuses ok.
Voltage across battery terminals zero!
Resistance 4 ohms.
Hooked the battery up to my Oxford maximiser but it refused to do anything.
Dug out my trusty 30 year old Bradex charger, the needle just about twitched. Half an hour later the needle was half way to the “low” section on the dial. The voltage across the battery terminals is now 9v.
Have I got a dead cell? Is it terminal?
Something discharged it,Now you need to find out why
If you are getting 9 volts between the battery terminals the batterys dead. As tonewuk says it may have been discharged ,But Batterys do have a life expectency. Breva 1100’s do have a constant power drain so I would recommend always using a optimate or similar type charger that way you can extent the life of a battery for up to 7 or 8 years ,if not i would only expect 4 to 5 years from a conventional battery,and much less if use infrequently. remember when buying batterys you only get what you pay for ,economy batterys really are a false economy, Ok on some thing with a kick start but Guzzis do take some turning over regards Keith
Battery Donald Ducked.
There is info on alternative batteries in the Non OEM section.
Unibat do one which is considerably cheaper than the OEM Yuasa, and they are OEM on Ducati, made in Italy.
Don’t be persuaded to go for Motobatt, made in China, or other cheaper ones on Ebay.
Battery tenders will never charge an AGM battery once discharged, you need a higher current. I use a CTEK3600 which puts out 3.5 Amps.
I have recovered a discharged AGM battery, it requires a very heavy charger capable of 8 Amps or so and capable of raising the voltage to over 15 Volts, and you need also to add a small amount of distilled water to each cell, then watch battery carefully when on charge and stop when it gets hot.
My Norge currently has a solar cell plugged in.
got a small solar panel too as i have no power in the garage works well.
I have just bought an AGM battery for my battery-eating-aprilia can I use a run of the mill minder on it or will I have to splash out on a c-tec thingy
f you look at battery minders they DO include the types of battery and if you search there are often good deals to be had I know Twiggers had some in and were at a discount and they do have mail order
The good news is the 30 year old battery charger pulled it back from the dead. It throws out 6 amps max but it was enough. The Oxford Maximiser now says it is a strong battery whereas yesterday it wouldn’t even recognise it was connected.
Now the embarrassing bit, I think I left the parking lights on…
Thanks for all the advice.
Can’t beat an old fashioned battery charger in this situation. Wonder how many batteries have been throw out that could have been recovered.
But be warned, my Odyssey did not last that much longer, and the next time I couldn’t recover it.
Mo, provided you don’t actually discharge the battery, then a tender will keep the charge.
There are alternatives now to the CTEK, Ring make one almost identical to look at which retails at half the price.
Thank you brian.