ptfjjj said:
Yamaguy55, I have a Sears charger that I mostly use for my boat battery, but I have always just used the settings provided on the charger straight up. Could you possibly describe your setup for me? How, exactly, do you plug the halogen bulb into the circuit? do you have some sort of bulb holder? Obviously, I am somewhat ignorant on the use of these things, and I'm guessing that there are others here that could benefit from your advice. You and Markjenn seem to have a bit of knowledge on the subject, and I, for one, appreciate the effort from you guys to educate those of us that don't.
I have an old halogen bulb from a set of long gone driving lights, it has short wires on it. I soldered a set of lugs onto it, and clamped the battery charger lead to one end, bolted the other to the battery terminal. I may get ambitious and mount it on a scrap of wood or something else, with ceramic insulators/standoffs, and make a nice setup out of it. I had only gotten to the test thing last fall, so haven't gotten around to a permanent thing yet. I have a too full life as it is.
The point of the entire post (on my part) was that you really don't need to go out and buy a new charger just for this, if you have something already. The goal is a slow, yet long charge that fully charged the VRLAB without charging so hard there is heavy outgassing and overheating, which will damage any battery. In the bad old days, a stiff charge would make the plates flake off into the bottom of the battery, shorting it out and killing it. The new batteries are drastically more resistant to this, but still not made of impervium. The bulb trick was told to me by a guy that works at Deka, a very large battery manufacturer that is somewhat local. He explained that a charge that is slow, yet long, will more fully charge a modern lead-acid battery than any fast charge. Plus, no overheating/excessive outgassing, etc. so I gave it a test and satisfied myself that I wasn't being fed bad info. And, I wanted to do it with every charger I had, to see if that made a difference. I think that other settings on my larger charger would probably work as well, but what I think is going on with the deep cycle marine setting is it maintains a longer session of slow charge at the end, getting a full compliment of electrons in the plates. You can never have too many electrons. I didn't do an amp check, just the bulb thing. I did notice my older battery ended up with a better charge this way. I just checked it: it is still at 12.42 VDC, and the last time I charged it was last fall. So while it won't hold the higher charge that my new one will, it isn't on its last legs.
The whole thing I was trying to avoid was overstressing the charging system on the FZ: motorcycle systems (at best) are designed to keep a charged battery charged, but rapidly do themselves in charging a sick one. An associate has replaced stators and regulator/rectifiers numerous times trying to keep his older bike running, I didn't want to go there with an electric start only, FI bike. Seemed like being pro active was far less demanding: I said I have an over full life as it is (got home from work last night, in a snowstorm, after 11 PM) so I do anything I can NOT to work on stuff.