New Batteries

Bought a new battery for the bike, filled it with the liquid supplied but I have no way of charging it for the first time. Is it essential to charge it? Or should I stop being a cheap skate and just buy a bike charger?

Charge it , your bike won’t charge it properly.

Nice, cheers for the speedy reply

I put mine straight on bike and went for a long ride, like an hour.

If you filled it with electrolyte, it shouldn't need charging. Try it, if it starts, take it for a long run and it will be fully charged.

Buy a decent bike charger. All modern engine charging systems are designed to maintain a battery at full charge but they won't fully charge a battery that is below full capacity. You'd probably never notice as the battery would start the bike fine even at half capacity. Most people are fine with that and assume the battery is fully charged.

But it will last longer if you give it a periodic trickle charge to bring it back to full capacity.

I always do this all my batteries. My car is 19 years old and is still on the original battery so it can't be doing it any harm.

The other option is to buy a cheap low amp charger for help cells. I have a 400Ma one I use to raise the voltage on very dead battery. It won't charge quickly but they're great for smaller batteries.

I put mine straight on bike and went for a long ride, like an hour.

I've always done that , my last battery lasted 7 years which seemed quite reasonable to me . I don't believe in maintenance chargers either mainly because I used to sell a well known brand and half of them we're returned as faulty. I just start the bike after 6 months storage and go for a ride .

So what's the longest anyone has had a bike battery in working order for and how did you look after it ?

So what's the longest anyone has had a bike battery in working order for and how did you look after it ?

I don't tend to keep bikes long enough to ever need a new battery - 7-8 years usually.

Cars I buy a year old and run into the ground - usually get about 20 years out of them. Never had to replace a battery before 15 years old.

I get through a battery a year easily until I started using the optimate.

Our car is 3 years old, computer says it's at 75% life. It's a stop/start so will cost a fortune to replace

I've got 2 optimates, got one on a 100ah motorhome leisure battery because it's better than the inbuilt charger. The float voltage is slightly lower at 13.6v and they let the battery rest for 1/2 hour periods to reduce electrolyte loss. Also if the battery goes faulty they can only deliver 800ma so nothing gets hot.

They could easily make Motorbike batteries more like leisure batteries and able to cope with deep cycles, but they don't. In fact I suspect they make motorbike batteries deliberately oversensitive to being drained so that they sell more!

Bikers always blame the grips/alarm/not riding enough and just buy a new battery so easy market to sell more products.