chris
Member
What battery tenders have you used to maintain and charge the battery?
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Plus 1I have been using nothing fancier than Battery Tender brand by Deltran for years. No problems. Available on Amazon.
I used an old BMW plug charger I had on the R18. I’d added normal battery tender plugs when I added heated gear on my other bikes, so hadn’t used it in many years.I just got the BMW Charger +. Works with canbus & all other batteries on motorcycles, and has a few advantages that I don't see on other chargers:
- design is plain & simple (I like)
- can be walmounted easy
- 2 line alpha numeric display tells you what is going on with the charging usine words & percentages - I prefer that to multicoloured lights.
- easy to butcher the cable so you can connect in to other pigtails (like Noco SAE etc) & use on all bikes.
This was actually cheaper than the optimate 4 in my market - £60 off eBay for brand new, sold by a BMW dealer.
I never really liked how glitzy the optimate's look, and not sure if they can be wallmounted.
The general theme is that any old battery charger / tender will work fine if connected directly to the battery via a pigtail of some sort - cheapest option.
If you want to use the built in 12v DIN socket on the left of the bike, you need a canbus compatible charger (BMW charger +, optimate 4, sure there are many others out there).
I use CTEK chargers. They are safe for all battery types and hard to beat for the money.What battery tenders have you used to maintain and charge the battery?
Adrian,I just bought a simple, microprocessor controlled battery charge/tender from ebay. It has the typical spring loaded clamps on the ends that directly attaches to the battery's terminals. Works great with my other bikes.. So then if I get a standard 12v D plug/cigarette lighter male plug and attach the the charger's clamps to the wired end of the cig plug it should work with my 18's female D socket?
Just resurrecting this thread. It seems that Ya'll are saying that it is in fact okay to just hook up a battery tender directly to the battery terminals while it is connected to the bike....Right? Please advise.
I have my chargers hooked directly to the battery along with heated gear leads on all my bikes but the R18.There’s a lot of very useful info on this topic on the site, I went through it all myself 6 months ago taking heed from owners before me. To save you time, in short……
Buy a proper CANBUS charger.
The electronics are very sensitive. I tried my ‘normal’ trickle chargers and they just didn’t work. Getting pigtail leads onto the battery is a faff anyway and I didn’t want to go messing. I bought an Optimate 4 CanBus edition for about £70 (in the UK). BMW do their own charger. America probably has its own makes too. Works a treat, plug straight into the DIN socket, switch on and forget about it.