About battery crap

[qgaex]

Hi All!

What I would like to know:

Can anybody report an original "Exide" bacteria that survived more than 3 years?

Can any body report another type of battery that gave more than 3 years of service?

(I do not know how to initiate a "survey", but maybe moderators can help.)
Background: I wonder whether it is just a quality problem with the original batteries or whether the BMW electrics are especially harsh towards the batteries.

Cheers

qgaex
+ who just watched his battery die on a Sunday morning after 33 months of life +

[NeilS]

I can't imagine that there is any fundamental defect in our batteries. I mean there are really only a handful of battery manufacturers in the world, and battery manufacturing is definitely not a black art. I'm sure that BMW doesn't say to Exide, "Cut the corners on these batteries to the point where they fail suddenly in large numbers, leaving our customers stranded far from home."

Nevertheless, they do fail (mine not yet, fortunately). Since they're sealed, we can't be underwatering them or causing the electrolyte to become contaminated by adding impure water. So that leaves three possibilities:

1. We are killing them by charging them excessively and/or incorrectly. Unlikely. While it's certainly possible to do this, it usually takes time, and many of the failures have occurred early in the bike's/battery's life.

2. There is something unusual about the RR's electrical system that is overcharging the batteries or is draining them excessively when the bikes are not in use. Easy to determine by measuring the charge voltage and the dark current. Therefore also unlikely.

3. There is some weird vibration mode present in these bikes that causes something in the battery to vibrate that's not supposed to. Eventually the vibration causes the plates to short out or an inter-cell connection to break. That would be my bet.

If my battery were to fail, I'd make this argument to BMW (not to my dealer, who wouldn't understand it). Since the failure is likely caused by the bike and not the battery, the 3-year bike warranty should apply, not the 2-year battery warranty. I'd guess that, right now, BMW is just passing the warranty charges on to Exide, and Exide, seeing a few dozen (or hundred) failures out of the millions of batteries they make, just covers the cost. BMW needs to study the bike/battery interaction and see if the bikes are really killing the batteries.

[Liam]

Hi,

My Exide died after 972 miles despite being hooked to the BMW charger every night. When the dealer put it on their stress tester, it passed !?! but when they put it back in the bike, the bike wouldn't start. They replaced it with another Exide.

I love this bike, but this battery reduces my confidence that she'll start every time. I bought an Odyssey PC535 that I'm (slowly) modifying to fit the R1200R. There is a really good article on fitting this battery to the R1200GS someplace on line. The installation problems on the R1200R are similar: the battery side fins make it too wide and have to be trimmed, and the terminals have to be modified to allow the cables to connect. The R1200GS mods seem like overkill in the case of the fins and not the best way to go in the case of the connectors. The solution I'm looking at minimizes the fin trim and uses small copper blocks as interposers so the cable routing remains essentially unchanged. Wunderlich makes a robust battery strap so there's no need to hammer out the OEM strap.

I've installed the PC535 yesterday (10/9/09). I still have some work to do on the contacts and the battery strap. One thing is clear, the Wunderlich strap DOES NOT FIT. I hammered out the OEM strap to get a temporary fix.

I do things slowly, but I'll post results when they're available. Right now I'm waiting for some copper bar stock to arrive (Amazon is an amazing resource) and hoping someone else completes and posts a good mod before I do.

Regards,
Liam

[Bill Stevenson]

Maybe BMW needs to re-think the specifications required for the battery. In an effort to save weight and provide maintenance free batteries, perhaps too many compromises have been made. Maybe going back to a lead acid battery would solve the problem. Or maybe allowing a slightly larger and heavier battery would solve the problem. It seems obvious that the currently specified battery is marginal for this application. The fact that this problem seems to be on-going and spans several model years argues against the notion that the battery manufacturer is making bad batteries. If there were a fundamental defect in this particular battery model it would have been found and fixed. No, I think BMW engineering needs to address this problem and specify a more robust battery.

Regards,

Bill

[qgaex]

Thanks for your answers. This seems to confirm my suspicions.
So please allow me to repeat my questions:

Can anybody report an original "Exide" battery that survived more than 3 years?

Can any body report another type of battery that gave more than 3 years of service?

It would be really interesting to know whether anybody ever achieved something like adequate battery life....

Cheers

qgaex
+whoneedsanotherreartire+

[vroomr]

Make of this what you will: my dealer inspected my bike at my request because the warranty's about to expire, and his note about the one year old battery (you do the math) says "battery is at 13v under load is borderline at 11v -- still good."

[celticus]

Do people with 1200RTs have the same issue? How about STs? Or R1150s? Is it something limited to bikes with the Canbus?

Mark

[hjsbmw]

Do people with 1200RTs have the same issue? How about STs? Or R1150s? Is it something limited to bikes with the Canbus?

Mark

Good questions!

My battery has about 30 months on it, and I have a feeling it is about to give out. It sounds weak after the bike stood for a few days, especially on cold mornings.

I read many reports of people intending to buy non-OEM replacements. Can anyone say positive things about doing so and which battery types you used?

[NeilS]

Harald,

You might be a good candidate for a Battery Bug. http://www.argusanalyzers.com/index.php?id=32. I'm probably going to get one, but it's a winter project for me and it sounds like you may have a more immediate need.

[deilenberger]

Harald,

You might be a good candidate for a Battery Bug. http://www.argusanalyzers.com/index.php?id=32. I'm probably going to get one, but it's a winter project for me and it sounds like you may have a more immediate need.

A friend with a brandy new GS got the Battery Bug. At first it told him his battery was 100% - now it's telling him it only has 60% capacity.. on a brand new battery. Just wonder what factors they use to calibrate the reading - since it works by looking at battery voltage droop when the starter is used, a K bike starter will draw lots less than an R bike (K bike has more smaller cylinders - less force needed to compress, and uses a high speed geared starter.. R bike has two honking big cylinders and only minimal gearing - pinion/ring-gear.)

[NeilS]

Don,

I can only speculate on the details of the algorithm. But it will be interesting to see if the trend continues on your friend's battery--and whether it correctly predicts a premature battery failure.

[hjsbmw]

Harald,

You might be a good candidate for a Battery Bug. http://www.argusanalyzers.com/index.php?id=32. I'm probably going to get one, but it's a winter project for me and it sounds like you may have a more immediate need.

A friend with a brandy new GS got the Battery Bug. At first it told him his battery was 100% - now it's telling him it only has 60% capacity.. on a brand new battery. Just wonder what factors they use to calibrate the reading - since it works by looking at battery voltage droop when the starter is used, a K bike starter will draw lots less than an R bike (K bike has more smaller cylinders - less force needed to compress, and uses a high speed geared starter.. R bike has two honking big cylinders and only minimal gearing - pinion/ring-gear.)

Has your friend tried charging the battery? Some dealers are good at not doing that before they sell their bikes. Depending on the battery's state and the distances ridden, the on-board system may not allow a 100% charge to be reached.

But, the battery bug may not be 100% reliable either. Dealers, again, are good at testing batteries and stating they are fine although in the bike they are too weak to crank the engine. The principle of the testing instruments used seems similar.

[ka5ysy]

Interesting find early this week: I was in a metric custom shop and there were 9 Exide batteries stacked over on the junk pallet. I offhandedly asked if they were victims of "instant battery death" and the shop owner said "Yep.. Bikes were running and then would not start. No warning of any problems until the instant failure."

BMW's are not the only bikes having this problem. It is the battery, not the bike or chargers.

FWIW, the load testing of AGM batteries seems to not properly predict possible weak batteries. I have had several Optima spiral cell batteries in my truck go weak and still test good by the load checking instruments in use at the distributor's warehouse.

[deilenberger]

Interesting find early this week: I was in a metric custom shop and there were 9 Exide batteries stacked over on the junk pallet. I offhandedly asked if they were victims of "instant battery death" and the shop owner said "Yep.. Bikes were running and then would not start. No warning of any problems until the instant failure."

BMW's are not the only bikes having this problem. It is the battery, not the bike or chargers.

That's been my WAG all along.. especially once I found out that Exide is made by Yuasa - who was imfamous for the same sort of failure.

[red baron]

So what is a good replacement battery for the OEM battery?
Thanks
Peter

[lewellen]

Can any body report another type of battery that gave more than 3 years of service?

The stock battery on my '94 CB1000 (bought new in 1995) lasted until 2002 at least. After that I can't say ... the bike wasn't mine any more. I have no idea what manufacturer made it; it was a sealed unit, is all I recall.

I can't imagine that there is any fundamental defect in our batteries. I mean there are really only a handful of battery manufacturers in the world, and battery manufacturing is definitely not a black art. I'm sure that BMW doesn't say to Exide, "Cut the corners on these batteries to the point where they fail suddenly in large numbers, leaving our customers stranded far from home."

Unfortunately, I can imagine there is a fundamental defect in the battery design. Just because we've been doing something for a long time, doesn't mean we really understand the process; we've just done it long enough to find by trial-and-error and incremental improvements how to make it better.

For one, they were designed specifically for our bike - apparently, anyway, given that it seems to be the only battery that fits without having to Do Something. So it's a new design. And new designs, even on things which we're supposed to understand very well, often have problems. To pick on BMW - how about final drives? Or, more generally, this is why a friend of mine will never buy a car until the manufacturer's had it on the line for at least three years.

Any time you change a design you risk introducing unknown factors, or changing something the importance of which you didn't know beforehand.

There's also the possibility that the design is fine but the actual manufacturing is not meeting specs and the QA process isn't catching it. Or, that some of their raw materials aren't up to spec, and either the pre-use inspections or the final QA aren't catching it. One of the ways a company can cut costs is to trim back the QA process - you put one battery out of 10,000 through a stress-test rather than one out of 1000, say. (Not that I know they do this in particular, obviously.) Doing this saves money, but the statistical chance of catching an intermittent problem - materials, fabrication, whatever - is greatly reduced.

1. We are killing them by charging them excessively and/or incorrectly. Unlikely. While it's certainly possible to do this, it usually takes time, and many of the failures have occurred early in the bike's/battery's life.

I had my first battery fail without ever having had it on a charger; the bike was (is) my daily commuter so was never "put up."

2. There is something unusual about the RR's electrical system that is overcharging the batteries or is draining them excessively when the bikes are not in use. Easy to determine by measuring the charge voltage and the dark current. Therefore also unlikely.

See my above comments re new systems; but I tend to agree with you, if it were that much over- or under-range, someone (Don? ) would have noticed by now.

3. There is some weird vibration mode present in these bikes that causes something in the battery to vibrate that's not supposed to. Eventually the vibration causes the plates to short out or an inter-cell connection to break. That would be my bet.

I would argue that, if this were the case, the problem is indeed a structural one with the battery, not with the bike. It's an intrinsically high-vibration environment and dealing with that should be (have been?) part of the design process.

In any case....

I'll stop babbling on now.

Good roads,

- Lewellen180

[NeilS]

For one, they were designed specifically for our bike - apparently, anyway, given that it seems to be the only battery that fits without having to Do Something. So it's a new design. And new designs, even on things which we're supposed to understand very well, often have problems.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought it was a standard YTX14-BS. Not the most common bike battery around, but also not the rarest. Many sources, and they've been around a long time. I agree with what you say about the engineering/manufacturing/quality process, but here the new design is the bike and not the battery.

[lewellen]

For one, they were designed specifically for our bike - apparently, anyway, given that it seems to be the only battery that fits without having to Do Something. So it's a new design. And new designs, even on things which we're supposed to understand very well, often have problems.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought it was a standard YTX14-BS. Not the most common bike battery around, but also not the rarest. Many sources, and they've been around a long time. I agree with what you say about the engineering/manufacturing/quality process, but here the new design is the bike and not the battery.

I've been wrong before ... and I'm sure I will again. :-)

The last time I checked for a cross-reference I didn't find anything; but that was - wow! how time flies - just about two years ago now.

Yuasa does indeed list that as a standard - and I wonder how people are doing with that one?

For amusement's sake, I just checked the Exide page ... their latest catalog (2007) doesn't list the R1200R as an application. :-)


Good roads,

- Lewellen

[Radar in oz]

Thanks for your answers. This seems to confirm my suspicions.
So please allow me to repeat my questions:

Can anybody report an original "Exide" battery that survived more than 3 years?

Can any body report another type of battery that gave more than 3 years of service?

It would be really interesting to know whether anybody ever achieved something like adequate battery life....

Cheers

qgaex
+whoneedsanotherreartire+

You may be asking the wrong people here, as there can't be too many (any?) R12R's that are more than 3 years old.

My bike will turn 3 next month, my battery died suddenly about a month ago so didn't quite make it.

Cheers
Peter

[8b]

My bike turned 3 in November 09, and my battery is on its last leg.