dead motorcycle battery – if i replace it but i
could have just recharged it it's going to cost me money i didn't need to spend, but if i just
recharge it instead of replacing it and it leaves me stranded down the road again it's going to cost
me even more money. so how can i tell if i should replace or recharge my dead motorcycle battery?
that's what we're gonna be talking about in this video. my name is adrian from youmotorcycle,
i do videos that help motorcyclists. today i'm gonna show you guys two ways to test your dead
motorcycle battery to see if you should recharge it, or replace it. i'm also gonna show you one
easy way of testing your motorcycle's charging system because sometimes this isn't the problem
(points to dead motorcycle battery).
Sometimes that is the problem (points to motorcycle).
all right so there are two ways to test a dead motorcycle battery. the first way is with a
multimeter. a multimeter is a great tool because it measures voltage, current, resistance, you name
it. you can use it for testing your motorcycle, your car, your house electronics, these things are
great. so how we're going to use our multimeter, we're going to take it, set it to 20 volts,
positive positive, negative to negative. but we don't want to test these when they just
came in from being ridden or when they just came in from being charged or when they just
came in from sitting outside for three weeks. we want to just see what the battery's voltage
is in its natural state. i'm going to put a little chart up on the screen and essentially
what you're going to want to do is charge your battery fully then take it off the charger, or
if you just came in for a ride just let it sit. after a couple hours take your multimeter, set it
to 20 volts, test it, see where the voltage is, see where it measures up on that chart, if it's in
the green zone your battery is probably fine, all you probably needed was just to recharge it.
If
it's in the red you obviously are going to want to replace the battery altogether. see that's reading
just about 10 volts? if it's in that yellow zone you're going to want to know that your battery's
on its way out. it's really going to depend on the kind of life and treatment you've given it. if
it's a fairly new battery that's from a good brand like yuasa not from a no-name brand like bs
battery, you could still get maybe another year another two years out of it. if something like
this brand is yellow and you know it's fairly recent you can probably keep on
using it just take better care of it. if it's a cheaper brand like this one i would
probably just replace it if it's in that yellow zone.
But let's say you're like adrian i hate
math i hate numbers i failed the second grade. is there any kind of simple color code way? the
second way of testing your battery is with this. it's called a battery load tester. this thing
is awesome. there's only one button you really can't screw it up. and again red for positive
black for negative. we clamp these on what we're interested is this color code here where it
goes green yellow red and we really want to just hit that button, hold it for 10 seconds, and
see how this needle reacts. let's do this. so after about 10 seconds it was kind of
touching yellow but it was still within green so i'm thinking you know what this battery
is probably good. let's try the next one. so right away we know this is
weak. we knew that already. it's been fully charged it's still weak that
should tell us everything we need to know but let's say we were really on the fence we'll
use our load tester.
Hit the button. boom right away straight as soon as we put a load against
this battery it drops down right to next to nothing. this battery so in the red obviously not
to be safe not to be trusted. you need to get rid of this battery right away, and you can tell
after the test it's not even weak anymore it's in red. it's a bad battery it's got to go. and now
you're thinking "but adrian i'm extremely lazy and i don't want to access my motorcycle battery. is
there some other way i can do this?" of course! if your battery has one of these it's called
a battery tender pigtail. basically it allows you to plug in and charge your battery or you can
plug in accessories if your bike has one of these you can actually use this because it
has a positive and a negative terminal. let me show you.
All right so make sure you watch
this part because this part is really important. what you want to make sure you do is test your
motorcycle's charging system. unless you know for sure that you've neglected your battery there
is a possibility that there could be something wrong with your motorcycle's charging system
and that's why your battery wasn't charged. so we're going to take that pigtail i was showing
you earlier so that way i don't have to work directly with the battery and we are going
to take our multimeter.
Again multimeters are super useful they're only like 15 to 20 dollars. i
strongly strongly recommend grabbing one of these because they come in so much handy and we're
gonna just take a peek here. positive negative okay so here we can clearly see this battery
13.5 volts because it just came off the charger. what i want you guys to see is right now i'm
about to turn the key and let's see what happens. to the on position – that immediately drops
down to 12.8 12.7 12.6 12.5. why is it dropping? because when we do that we are lighting up
the dash, we're turning on the computer, we are lighting up the headlight, everything that
the electronics are doing, they're drawing away from that battery, so it makes sense that when
we have the power on the battery's having the juice sucked out of it.
But i want you guys
to see what happens when i hit that starter. so i'm a one man team, i'm sorry if the camera
angles are a little bit shaky or not the best but as you can tell the headlights on that's why we're
reading less than 12 volts, and i hit the starter okay so what the heck just happened right? we're
trying to turn it over, trying to turn it over, the voltage is getting lower and lower. that makes
sense because we're drawing more power out of the battery every time we try and turn the motor over
and then what? boom! finally fires up right? and then the voltage spikes right up to 14.3 volts.
that is the most voltage we've seen this whole video and that means the charging system is
working how it's supposed to.
If your charging system cannot get your battery over 14.3 volts
and if you rev it up even higher than 14.3 volts your charging system is the problem. your battery
may be a problem but your battery is kind of like the effect of the bigger problem and
the bigger problem is not the battery, the bigger problem is the bike charging system.
so please make sure that you test your motorcycle batteries make sure that you know if your battery
will or won't leave you stranded.
replace it if you need to don't spend money if you don't
but also test your charging systems because you could have a charging system problem
not necessarily just a battery problem and you don't want to be stranded again after
you just spent money on a new battery that would really suck. like this video if you want to
encourage me to make more videos aimed at helping motorcyclists. like if you found it helpful.
subscribe if you want more videos that could possibly help you out. my name is adrian check out
youmotorcycle.com, ride safe, but have fun! peace!.
