Low Battery Warning

[flatfour]

Richard, use of a maintenance charger might help, but in my experience when these modern sealed for life batteries fail, it is immediate and, if you think that the battery might be past its best, I personally would replace it straight away.

So far, I have suffered failures with little or no warning on my car and the Ducati that I owned, as well as the BMW, all with "sealed for life" batteries. That is why I will change the battery on the GTR as soon as it arrives at the dealers. I don't want to be stuck on a winter's day, away from home. The older bikes that I own at least have a kickstart.

Incidentally, whilst I have no doubt that regular use helps, my car covers around 30,000 miles per year and the battery failed one winter's morning after driving from Norwich to Kent. It was only parked for a couple of hours and had no life at all when I returned to it, however it managed the cold start that day without any problems and no warning lights came up on the journey of some 130 miles!

[Richard]

Hi

In my experience the worse thing you can do with a battery is allow it to go flat, and it will protect it from that so worth the £20.00 it cost

[pistole]

I looked at my 2012's manual , and yup , its there too. LOW BATTERY and the accompanying battery symbol.

learned something new here !

.

[flatfour]

The battery on the GTR was replaced at the dealer on Tuesday and I checked the voltage today, after a very cold few days during which the bike has stood in the garage. It showed 12.2 volts, as against the 11.5 - 11.7 that the original would indicate only a few hours after charging (bike first registered January 2012).

Hopefully I can now look forward to at least another two years of reliability!

[SirToU]

I'm really not very good at being tactful.....

Your bikes are alive from the very moment you connect a battery too it....  Immobilizer light flashes ever 5 seconds or so.....  It's drawing current from the battery....  Leave it for weeks and it will drain.....and go dead.....

Use it for short runs in winter, headlights, heated grips, - the cold....  Will kill the power in the battery, not necessarily the battery.

Page 232-234 of the manual gives discharge rates from 100% to 0% while standing... It also says on page 233 that in the right (or wrong) conditions, a battery can discharge in a matter of days...  But they are talking about 100% to 0%

Sub 10v on the display and I think you are going to have trouble starting the GTR, that's about 75%  of the power of the battery.   If everything was linear (which it's not), worst case, you could have problems starting your beast in days, not weeks....

Over 100,000 miles on three different GTRs from 2008 and only minor problems to do with repetitive short runs (3-4 mile trips), I think I have the experience to comment.....

We are all our own worst enemies.... We are human!

'Steps down from soap box'.....

Neil

[jonathan]

Your bikes are alive from the very moment you connect a battery too it....  Immobilizer light flashes ever 5 seconds or so.....  It's drawing current from the battery....  Leave it for weeks and it will drain.....and go dead.....

Immobilizer light shuts off completely after 24 hours.

[virginiajim]

I've actually been pretty lucky with that.  I don't use a tender and it can sit for a month at a time without being ridden  but it still starts up.  These bikes have a nasty habit of the connections getting loose and they don't have to get that loose to cause issues with charging and the like.

[Boomer]

When new I let the bike stand for 4 months each for the 1st two winters.
No battery tender and all I did was start the bike once every 2 weeks or so and let it idle for a few minutes.
Now I plug the battery tender in but still have the OEM battery after 6.25 years.