• Hi everyone,

    As you all know, Coffee (Dean) passed away a couple of years ago. I am Dean's ex-wife's husband and happen to have spent my career in tech. Over the years, I occasionally helped Dean with various tech issues.

    When he passed, I worked with his kids to gather the necessary credentials to keep this site running. Since then (and for however long they worked with Coffee), Woodschick and Dirtdame have been maintaining the site and covering the costs. Without their hard work and financial support, CafeHusky would have been lost.

    Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working to migrate the site to a free cloud compute instance so that Woodschick and Dirtdame no longer have to fund it. At the same time, I’ve updated the site to a current version of XenForo (the discussion software it runs on). The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.

    Unfortunately, the new software version doesn’t support importing the old site’s styles, so for now, you’ll see the XenForo default style. This may change over time.

    Coffee didn’t document the work he did on the site, so I’ve been digging through the old setup to understand how everything was running. There may still be things I’ve missed. One known issue is that email functionality is not yet working on the new site, but I hope to resolve this over time.

    Thanks for your patience and support!

Lithium Batteries - Different Charger Requirements

River-Runner

River-Runner

Husqvarna
AA Class
I did a little investigation of lithium batteries and their charging requirements. Found I wasn't really taking care of our two Earth-X batteries.

I have the Battery Tender Plus I was using to charge my Earth-X batteries in the Huskies. I found the float voltage (the trickle charge voltage) put out by the BT Plus charger is too low - it will in fact make the lithium battery discharge down to 13.2 volts. While the BT Plus is great for lead acid batteries, it is not putting out the right voltage for the lithium style battery

Battery Tender is now making 2 small chargers for lithium batteries, around $30-$36 USD. These two chargers have a float rate of 13.8 volts to keep the battery happy. When the charger is taken off and the battery is allowed to rest, the voltage should be 13.3 volts or above.

The Battery Tender and Earth-x customer service folks were great in replying to my questions.

I don't know what the effect of keeping the Earth-X is at 13.2 volts, but I sure don't want to replace these batteries any time soon. At full charge, they spin our bikes much faster.
 
Zomby -

You are absolutely right, lithium batteries do maintain charge much better than lead acid, but when I want to grab the bike and get out, I don't want to deal with a discharged battery. To me, it's worth $30 USD to get the right charger / maintainer to avoid a possible problem. I've not yet seen a definitive opinion on whether keeping a lithium on the "right" charger will also extend battery life, I guess time will tell.
 
I have an Oddessy Extreme battery in a hand held crankshaft starter and if I remember right the voltage numbers in your first post were the same as in my Oddssey info sheet. I think they said not to charge it unless the voltage dropped below a certain level and that it could sit for over a year without a charge and not lose it's charge (unlike a lead acid battery). In your case when you are riding your battery is getting all the charging that it needs, I would think the trickle charger is not helping anything and maybe doing more harm than good.
 
Lankydoug,

You have to do what you think is right. I'm just relating the recommendations received directly from Earth-X, so given we have Earth-X batteries, I'll follow their directions. Best of luck.
 
Just remember that on a 13/14 310 as the battery gets topped off it will cycle one of the relays and ends up flooding the bike. Unless you are right next to the bike, charge any battery off the bike. The following is what occurs... BTW, this is an ancient BT jr. Only used it once or twice during 2+ yr life of my EarthX. I should probably get the new version.

View: https://youtu.be/DYS1RBrnDE4

The stock Yuasa will cycle at a lower rate but still acts the same.
 
River-Runner said:
Lankydoug,

You have to do what you think is right. I'm just relating the recommendations received directly from Earth-X, so given we have Earth-X batteries, I'll follow their directions. Best of luck.
Click to expand...
The title of the thread doesn't specify that we are only talking about Earth-X and I'm saying Oddessy might be a little different than what you are doing. Trickle to your hearts content.. lol

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sVUXpOdbik
 
River-Runner said:
Lankydoug,

I went to the Oddessy Battery site and their Oddessy Extreme Series Battery is an AGM lead acid battery, it is NOT a lithium battery. Do you maybe have a different battery?

http://www.odysseybattery.com/extreme_batteries.aspx

RR
Click to expand...
My mistake, you're right about the Oddessy not being lithium but the description also says it is a dry cell and lacks acid. Maybe they consider gel a dry cell I really don't know. I remember the charging info was very specific on voltage (similar to your 13.8 V and letting it sit after charging) and recommended not using a trickle charger. The guy who built my crank drive starter recommended the Oddyssey and said he would usually go a race season without charging his.
 
On the Earth-X website they state that you can use a regular lead acid battery charger, as follows:

In the event you have to charge the battery, use a Lithium (LiFePO4) battery charger or a lead-acid battery charger that does not charge above 14.6V, will automatically turns off when the battery is fully charged (based on volts) and does not have a de-sulfate mode. Do not use any charger with voltage that pulses above 15V! This will damage the battery. If in doubt, consult the manual that comes with your charger.

They also have a chart showing which chargers can be used. The Battery Tender Jr. is okay, but they also specifically state what you're saying, that the Batter Tender Plus only puts out 13.2 volts.
 
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