Well duh! Just turn the key on before you start putting your gear on. It should be good to go if you have your GPS and Aux lights running!
Agreed. Before the sky falls on your heads, consider the expected (not proven yet) life of the Shorai is double that of your AGM battery and also consider that, in cold conditions, the Shorai should have plenty of reserve to help start your bike. My personal experience (before I went with a lower viscosity winter oil) with my old batteries has left me waiting for the sun to come up to warm the bike a few degrees in winter to allow it to start OR searching for a jump because I ran the battery dead from two or three slow crank starts. A potential slow initial start but seemingly greater crank speed once the battery is activated in cold weather with ability to re-try starting on failed first attempt is better than dumping reserve charge on the first attempt without starting.Well duh! Just turn the key on before you start putting your gear on. It should be good to go if you have your GPS and Aux lights running!
I hear Bust and Wheaton do that first thing. Sad sad men they are.
For an engine to start it requires some minimum voltage to fire the coils (>8.0 volts) and the ability to spin the engine at roughly 40 rpm or higher. Once these fundamentals are met then it is up to the engine management by the ECU. This is where any glitches in fueling would show up with the opportunity to flood the engine if it cranks too slow without the coils firing.
The FSM (Gen I) sez:
I would expect a Shorai battery cranked engine to start normally during a slow crank, without any greater tendency to flood than with an ordinary low voltage normal lead/acid battery. Shorai says that they don't expect that you would/should have to do anything different until 20°F and lower.
I woykdnt think so, unless you left something on when you shut the bike off. All the higher amp battery does is give you more available charge to deplete before the battery won't have enough to start the bike.
Absolutely not
There are some confusing terms used in describing the electrical characteristics of batteries. What you wrote here are the Amp/Hour ratings for the batteries. This is a measure of how much steady current the batteries can supply into a load until it is depleted to a specific point, typically until the battery has 10 volts at the terminals which indicates a nearly totally discharged battery. An example of this would be accidentally leaving your GPS on overnight. The Shorai battery stores more current than a standard lead/acid battery allowing it to hold up better to uh-oh situations like leaving something on overnight.
Which is what I wrote to them about and have requested this information as well as some other things. We will see what develops.
Excellent question and answer! Ionbeam is da MAN!Absolutely not
What matters to starting is Cold Cranking Amps. CCA is measured with the battery at 0°F and is the measure of the current the battery can deliver for 30 seconds and still maintain at least 1.2 volts per cell. For a 12 volt battery this would be 7.2 volts at the terminals. Batteries are chemical devices and their performance degrades as temperature goes down so this test at 0°F puts the battery at its weakest point. (Did Shorai put their battery under load for 4-5 minutes before making this test to earn the 210/270 CCA rating?)
The amount of current that flows when starting the FJR is determined by the resistance of the starter windings and is a fixed number. The 14 AH battery is rated for 210 CCA and the 18 AH battery is rated for 270 CCA. The FJR starter motor may consume up to ~66 amps so both Shorai batteries can deliver 3-4 times more current than the starter motor can accept. This means that both batteries would spin the starter motor at the same speed because both batteries would have the same voltage at the battery terminals. The Shorai batteries have move volts per cell than a lead/acid battery resulting in slightly higher voltage at the battery terminals. This higher voltage will let the starter motor turn a little faster than a lead/acid battery and it is noticeable when you crank an engine with a Shorai battery.
Looking forward to this information.
The following is true about the battery not recovering if you let the voltage drop below 10 volts either by leaving something on with the key off or leaving the motorcycle sit for months while the ECU drains a steady trickle of current during that time.
(1) Earlier this year Shorai batteries were unavailable while Shorai made design changes to the terminals on their batteries and now the new battery terminals should be more robust than the ones sold before March 2011.
