I'm finally getting around to resurrecting my Tenere that has been sitting idle for the better part of two years. I fired it up periodically over that time and even replaced the stale gasoline in the tank about a year ago. But it's been probably at least 9 months since I last fired it up.
I turned the ignition key yesterday and got nothing. Battery totally dead, so I put it on the charger (Optimate6). The charger went into the save/desulphate mode for a couple of hours (as expected with a drained battery) then moved on to the normal charge mode and I let that go overnight. I checked it a couple of times this morning and all looked good, so I let it continue to charge.
Early afternoon I was in the garage doing other stuff with my wife and we started to hear a high-pitched whine, like some kind of electronic tone. I finally isolated it to the right panel of the Tenere where the battery sits. Disconnected the charger and the whine stopped within 30 seconds or so. I should have done some further inspecting immediately but instead decided to see if the bike would start. It did, somewhat sluggishly, and I was going to let it run long enough to warm up so I could change the oil. But the high-pitched whine started again quickly and much louder than before (even over the engine noise), then I started to get a weird smell like rubber or plastic getting very hot. I killed the bike and removed the right side cover (with some trepidation!). Not surprisingly the battery was extremely hot. And the whining continued unabated. I found a fan and blasted air directly on it and that calmed things down after a minute or so.
I assume the whining was the battery outgassing. If anyone knows better I'd love to hear what else would cause this. For some reason I thought the Optimate charger would detect a defective battery and stop charging it before anything bad happened, but apparently that is not the case. I feel lucky that I was in the garage when the whining started and that it didn't happen overnight or while I was away from the house.
Clearly the battery is shot and needs to be replaced. But more importantly, this was a pretty scary episode that I naively did not think would happen with an AGM (non-lithium) battery and a modern smart battery charger.
I turned the ignition key yesterday and got nothing. Battery totally dead, so I put it on the charger (Optimate6). The charger went into the save/desulphate mode for a couple of hours (as expected with a drained battery) then moved on to the normal charge mode and I let that go overnight. I checked it a couple of times this morning and all looked good, so I let it continue to charge.
Early afternoon I was in the garage doing other stuff with my wife and we started to hear a high-pitched whine, like some kind of electronic tone. I finally isolated it to the right panel of the Tenere where the battery sits. Disconnected the charger and the whine stopped within 30 seconds or so. I should have done some further inspecting immediately but instead decided to see if the bike would start. It did, somewhat sluggishly, and I was going to let it run long enough to warm up so I could change the oil. But the high-pitched whine started again quickly and much louder than before (even over the engine noise), then I started to get a weird smell like rubber or plastic getting very hot. I killed the bike and removed the right side cover (with some trepidation!). Not surprisingly the battery was extremely hot. And the whining continued unabated. I found a fan and blasted air directly on it and that calmed things down after a minute or so.
I assume the whining was the battery outgassing. If anyone knows better I'd love to hear what else would cause this. For some reason I thought the Optimate charger would detect a defective battery and stop charging it before anything bad happened, but apparently that is not the case. I feel lucky that I was in the garage when the whining started and that it didn't happen overnight or while I was away from the house.
Clearly the battery is shot and needs to be replaced. But more importantly, this was a pretty scary episode that I naively did not think would happen with an AGM (non-lithium) battery and a modern smart battery charger.
