Motorcycle Battery Charger

If you are a serious motorcyclist and own one or more motorcycles, you need to have a 12 volt motorcycle battery charger at your disposal for when its needed. And the best way to have one at hand always is to own a motorbike battery charger yourself and have it in your shed or garage.

What it will do for you is charge up the 12 volt motorcycle batteries on your motorbike or bikes so they are fully-charged, and the batteries will supply maximum energy when it is time to start up the motorcycle.

Sure, you can kick start many of the smaller motorbikes in use today, but many of the bigger road machines don't have a kick start foot lever. So unless you have a friend or two to push you and the bike when your bike battery won't kick it over, you are going to want to have a fully-charged battery on that machine. And that's what the motorcycle battery charger is for.

There is nothing complicated or mysterious about a battery charger. You just plug one end of it into your household electricity supply, which is 110v AC in the USA. In Europe and Australiait is more likely to be 220 volts, but that is unimportant here. What you need to know is that the battery charger takes that high AC voltage and changes it to a DC current at a lower voltage to suit the battery you need to charge. For a nominally 12v battery, for a car or a motorcycle, this will mean the charger puts out anything from 14 to 16 volts into the battery to keep it fully charged.

The cheapest and simplest car and motorbike chargers will have a low amperage, which means they 'push' electricity into the motorbike's battery at a very low rate of charge. You can leave the bike charger to do this Trickle Charge of the battery for 12 hours or maybe even a couple of days. It cannot charge your battery quickly, which would take a high amperage rate of charge. But in a way that's good because it is difficult to over-charge your battery with a trickle charger.

Over-charging any battery will damage the battery and shorten its 'life'. That is the number of years you can expect to use it for. When you charge a battery at a rate that is too fast for it to handle, the battery heats up a lot and this can warp or buckle the metal plates inside the acid or gel electrolyte. The process also produces hydrogen gas, which has to escape, and which can be dangerous if a spark ignites it. So you need good ventilation while you are charging your battery,

Middle-of-the-range battery chargers will have more than one charging rate, and so they are able to fast-charge a flat battery as well as to trickle-charge overnight or longer. You need to know your own battery's capacity, which is marked on it in A/h (amp hours). You can then consult the manufacturer's instructions to select a fast-charge rate (however-many Ampereres) you can use for however-many hours to charge your battery quickly but safely. There's no point in using a super-fast charge rate if it kills or blows up your battery!

Top-of-the-range battery chargers will have built-in electronic 'smarts' that can test and analyze your motorcycle or auto battery before the charging process even begins and tailor the charging rate and the length of time you charge to suit the battery perfectly. This sophisticated electronic circuitry does not come cheap but, in my own humble opinion, I truly believe it is well worth while. But then I have two motorcycles and two autos to care for and maintain. I also have other rechargeable batteries for some of my other interests - such as ham radio - where I sometimes go portable and take a radio transceiver and antenna with me and operate the set from a picnic table someplace like a park.

Whichever type of battery charger you buy for your motorcycle or other rechargeable batteries is a personal choice that depends on the money you wish to spend, the battery or batteries you plan on charging and the features you want the battery charger to have. So check out a few motorcycle battery chargers and pick the options you need. It's your money you'll be spending, so it's your right to choose. I hope this article has helped you with that choice!