Persistent Problem 2009 G650GS

From the time I bought my bike in June 2009 I have had a problem first with the stock wet cell going flat and losing a couple of ounces out of each cell in as short a time as three days. The first week I had the bike it stalled here in town while I was running errands and would not restart until I pushed into a gas station and they were nice enough to put it on their charger for twenty minutes. I had been running the PIAA 1100x lights that the dealer installed intermittently during the day anytime there was a lot of traffic around. At the bikes 1000 mile service the dealer said they could not find a problem with the battery or charging system. I changed the battery to a sealed AGM type that worked fine for the rest of the year including several 400 to 600 mile trips. Over the winter the battery was kept in the bike on a BMW charger. This year I started having problems again with the battery again after a month of riding. I would usually keep the bike on the tender if I knew I would be too busy to be riding it for a while. If I was running the bike daily I would not put it on the charger thinking that just running the bike would keep the battery well charged. About 6 weeks ago the bike would stall for no apparent reason and would restart but would not run unless I kept the throttle open by holding it or setting the throttle lock to keep the revs up. Other club members said they thought it might be water in the gas so I pumped the tank out and filled it with gas from the station I usually go to, which seemed to work for a week. It was getting late for the 6000 mile service with 6700 miles on the bike so I called a different dealer much closer to where I live who when I asked him what might be the problem with the battery, he asked if I had had accessory lights installed when I bought the bike and I said yes. He claimed that some technicians wire the lights incorrectly. I brought the bike in and they said that the original installation was done incorrectly . The bike again worked fine for about a week and then stalled and when I got it home and put it on the tender it took much much longer to recharge to 80%. When I took it out again afterwards it stalled a block from my house. I'm figuring the battery is shot (I hope) so I replaced it with a slightly larger sealed AGM battery that required modifying the battery tray. The bike is still disassembled in my yard in my new summer time garage.

Sounds like you might have trashed the sealed battery before the accessory light installation was corrected. Did you ask what was incorrect and how it was corrected?

There is a great article in this month's ON about motorcycle batteries and battery chargers - while I personally use a Battery Tender Jr. it does not have the "bring a battery back from the dead" capabilities and I am betting your charger probably does not either. Without that, repeatedly discharging a battery to dead even charging it after, will kill it in short order (and maybe even with it, though I have heard great things about the new hi-tech chargers.)

I believe your GS has a 400-watt alternator, with those lights on you are taking already over 25% of the max output.

Low revs in town

I don't have a clue about your stalling problem. It may or may not be a battery problem. I could be a fuel injection problem if you have to keep your revs up to keep it running. In reference to you battery going dead, as Ted said, it might have been your lights being installed improperly that killed it but you won't know until you get the bike back together and try the new battery. I run PIAAs on my 05 650GS and I have a Kisan Charge Guard on the bike to monitor my electrical system. I find that if I run my lights in town it tends to slowly drain the battery because I'm not able to keep the revs up. If the voltage drops below 11.9, I shut things down and it recovers pretty quickly. It's a lifesaver on our bikes. Be sure to closely follow the installation instructions if you decide to get one. If you find your battery is still going dead when the bike sits for a period, you may have to put in a switch to disconnect the battery. My first bike was a small Honda and it had a high resistance short that caused the battery to slowly discharge. The shop couldn't find the problem and I didn't have the money to throw at it at the time so they installed a switch that I shut off when I got off the bike and it took care of the problem. I suggest this only as an interim fix until you can find someone to take a good look at your system.

My old GPSIII could monitor voltage, apparently the "secret" screen on the Garmin 2610 can do it as well. If you have a GPS (mine is wired in through the accessory plug by attaching the power lead to a powerlet plug) you might check to see if there is a way to monitor voltage with it.

Ted said:

My old GPSIII could monitor voltage, apparently the "secret" screen on the Garmin 2610 can do it as well. If you have a GPS (mine is wired in through the accessory plug by attaching the power lead to a powerlet plug) you might check to see if there is a way to monitor voltage with it.

Click to expand...

Wow! I didn't know that about the 2610. I have one in a drawer next to my computer desk, I'll have to dig it out and attach it to the bike. I used to use it for the car and thought it might be a bit too big for the bike. I have a bike kit that came with it. How do you get to the secret screen.

I rode to my club's Lake Carmi, South of the Border, camp out last weekend and proceeded to run up 500 miles on the bike circumnavigating our Northeast Kingdom without a problem until I came upon a black bear who high tailed it back into the woods as soon as he caught wind of me. The Kuryakin voltage meter stayed in the green the whole trip except when I was running the PIAA 1100x driving lights and the heated grips when the meter would show a drop below green. I am ditching the driving lights as soon as I can and will probably replace them with Vision-X LED lamps. I'll probably keep the bracket and just remove the lights.

i bought my g650gs last july and have similar issues. but i will add one. when i use the heated hand grips on high it becomes really stiff and will actually stay in the last position it was put (it stays on unless i manually roll out of the throttle) whne mine decides to no continue running it is prefaced by a surging ot the rpm's i dont think this is a battery issue. in the winter if i drive less than a mile it wont start again. it turns over fine but it just wont start. i was told it is a battery issue but i dont think it is. also my neutral light stays on, it gets brighter when its in neutral. its under warranty so as soon as i can get the bike to the dealer they should be able to fix most if not all those issues.

Warren
My throttle would stick with the heated grips on high also.
I put a small washer between the bar end weight and the grip and the problem went away. Your grip is expanding and touching the bar end weight.
Cal

thanks! i can fix that quickly!

I had a new battery fail after about 6 months.

I ride all winter with a Gerbing jacket liner, pants liner, and G3 gloves. I had heard that riding with a lot of heated gear can result in a dead battery, even after a long highway ride. In order to check to see if I had an issue, I bought a volt meter that I temporarily installed on the end of my BMW adapter cable that plugs into the accessory outlet and has a cigarette lighter socket on the other end. I used a velcro tie to position the Equus battery monitor where I could read it:

http://www.amazon.com/Equus-3721-Battery-Charging-Monitor/dp/B000EVWDU0/ref=sr_1_9?ie=UTF8&s=automotive&qid=1280549795&sr=8-9

After riding for a number of weeks in town and on the highway, I found that if I turned all the Gerbing gear up all the way at the same time, the voltage would drop below 12 volts, indicating I was discharging the battery. Based on that, I decided I needed a permanently mounted volt meter. My brother mentioned that he read a review about the Argus Battery Bug:

http://www.amazon.com/Argus-BB-SBM12-PS-Battery-Monitor-Motorcycles/dp/B0029VY4G4/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=automotive&qid=1280549795&sr=8-2

The Battery Bug at about $50 was not much more than the $30 or so I would have to spend of a simple volt meter. So, I went with it. It gives me a voltage reading, but what is perfect for the Gerbing gear is that if the voltage drops below 12 volts for more than 30 seconds, it sounds an alarm and flashes an icon on the display. With a simple volt meter, you still need to be watching the meter. With the Battery Bug, you can pretty much ignore it until you hear the alarm; at which time you can turn down the Gerbing gear. As a bonus, the main feature of the Battery Bug is that is performs a load test on your battery every time you start your bike. It displays the remaining battery life as a percentage. It claims to warn you about an impending battery failure before you are stranded by it.

I figured out after installing it that it is a good idea to include an easy way to disconnect and reconnect the battery bug. It wires directly to the battery, which is the way I installed it the first time. After reading the FAQ info on their web site, I discovered that they suggest that you disconnect and reconnect the battery bug when it gives you a failed battery reading, just to verify that the battery is really bad. Getting to my battery requires removing a lot of screws, so I installed a weather proof spade connector on the ground side of the wire going to the Battery Bug. If I want to reset it, I can easily disconnect, wait 30 seconds, and reconnect the Battery Bug.

The battery currently on the bike is about a year old. If the battery has been charged on the BMW Maintenance Charger the night before, the Battery Bug reports around 50% remaining life. If I ride it on my usual short trips around town without using the BMW Charger, within about 2 days it will read down around 35%. When the reading gets below 30%, a weak battery icon comes on and the Battery Bug beeps once each time you shut off the bike to remind you that you have a weak battery.

Once this battery starts to read below 30%, I plan to replace it with either an AGM or a Gel Cell battery.

I cooked an odyssey battery on a trip to Mexico a few years ago. I was on an '03 F650GS and running heated grips and heated vest. It was damn cold in NW Mexico in mid March. I had a LED monitor and tried to be judicious about battery drain. The bike got me there and back but the battery was kaput about a month later. There's not a lot of reserve capacity on these 650's.

I am going to look into the Argus monitor.

Acejones said:

I cooked an odyssey battery on a trip to Mexico a few years ago. I was on an '03 F650GS and running heated grips and heated vest. It was damn cold in NW Mexico in mid March. I had a LED monitor and tried to be judicious about battery drain. The bike got me there and back but the battery was kaput about a month later. There's not a lot of reserve capacity on these 650's.

I am going to look into the Argus monitor.

Click to expand...

I have heard that leaving a battery in a discharged state will shorten the life of the battery, and can even kill a new battery in an extreme situation.

In the winter, when I am running all the Gerbing gear, I use the BMW maintenance charger every night. That way, I am starting out every day with a fully charged battery. I have the Gerbing dual controller, so the other thing I do is dial back the controller until the lowest voltage reading I get on the Argus monitor is around 13 volt (the bike normally reads 14.2 with all the Gerbing gear off). The normal resting voltage of the battery is 12.5 volt, so at 13 volt the alternator is handling the load and providing a small charge to the battery.

If I am on a trip where I will be away from my charger for a few days, I also turn the Gerbing gear off when I come into stop and go traffic in a town. With no highway wind, it takes more than the 5 or 10 minutes needed to get through a small town before you start cooling down. While you are going through each little town, your battery is getting a little extra charge. I have found that the best RPM for charging is 2500-3000, so I ride through the small towns maintaining around 3000 RPM.

Using this technique, I have, so far, never even had a problem with the battery turning over slow, let alone going dead.

Since my last battery failed when only about 6 months old, I am hoping the load test performed by the Argus will give me plenty of warning so I can replace the current battery when it is convenient and not when I am on a trip. I guess I won't know how well that part of the monitor works until I get to that point, but the low voltage alarm feature is perfect for heated gear.

My last bike, a '93 GSPD with stock 270w alternator, handled my
Gerbing's vest and gloves without a problem. Now that I have 400w of power, I don't worry about a dead battery, but then, like on the airhead, I keep the rpm's up close to or above 4000. In the month I've owned it, its never failed to start, and I've never put it on a charger even though the battery is several years old. Maybe the key to these bikes is the same as the airheads, keep the rpm's up.

Tom

I think you are right about the RPM thing. The BMW dealer always told me to try to keep the RPMs at or above 3000 to be sure the battery is being charged. After I connected my volt meter, though, I discovered that I get exactly the same voltage at 2500, even under load. Another thing I noticed is that above 4000 RPM the voltage actually drops slightly. With no load it goes from 14.2 to 14.0. I assume this is because at higher RPMs the engine is drawing slightly more juice. This may vary a bit from one individual bike to another, so it seems like having some kind of volt meter might be a good idea if you are using heated clothes, lights, heated grips, etc.

gblawler said:

I think you are right about the RPM thing. The BMW dealer always told me to try to keep the RPMs at or above 3000 to be sure the battery is being charged. After I connected my volt meter, though, I discovered that I get exactly the same voltage at 2500, even under load. Another thing I noticed is that above 4000 RPM the voltage actually drops slightly. With no load it goes from 14.2 to 14.0. I assume this is because at higher RPMs the engine is drawing slightly more juice. This may vary a bit from one individual bike to another, so it seems like having some kind of volt meter might be a good idea if you are using heated clothes, lights, heated grips, etc.

Click to expand...

What I'd like to have is an amp meter. Then I could monitor the energy going into or out of the battery. We used shunted ampmeters on boats to monitor the charge/discharge rate of the batteries. When I tear into the bike this Winter, I'm going to see if I can mount one on it.

Tom

From MARS said:

What I'd like to have is an amp meter. Then I could monitor the energy going into or out of the battery. We used shunted ampmeters on boats to monitor the charge/discharge rate of the batteries. When I tear into the bike this Winter, I'm going to see if I can mount one on it.

Tom

Click to expand...

That is exactly what we need. I have had a lot of cars with an amp meter but have never seen one on a bike, but there's no good reason why it would not work. I have always assumed that if the voltage is above the resting voltage of the battery, the battery is charging, and if it is below it is discharging. I have heard other people say this as well, but the amp meter would be just the ticket.

The other idea that I thought of was a voltage limiting circuit. I have heard about these for charging aux batteries in RV's. The idea is pretty simple. You have a switching circuit that monitors the voltage and disconnects the aux battery whenever the voltage is below 13.5 or some specific voltage. That way, the aux battery only gets charged when there is excess voltage available. The same circuit could be used for Gerbing gear so that the gear would turn on automatically whenever the voltage is high and turn off automatically when it is low. I was unable to locate a voltage limit switch that would work for this. I think I found one, but it was limited to 5 amps; my Gerbing gear uses about twice that.