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Wednesday, August 11, 2004

Flat battery

Although the electrics seemed to work fine at first I've now had a flat battery on 2 occasions on returning to the bike. After removing the battery I measured the resistance across the main circuit and found that is was 570 ohms. This will give a leakage of around 20mA which is quite considerable.

I thought it might be water or something in the key switch but decided to unplug the voltage regulator...open circuit! I then measured the resistance across the red & black leads of the regulator and there was my leak (The regulator is a new 120W 4-wire single-phase module).

As I don't have technical details or a circuit diagram of the regulator I needed more information about regulators in general; had I assumed too much? An internet search revealed that a number of OE regulators have a 5th 'sense' lead that connects after the ignition switch, for example http://www.takisnet.org/~abayko/vreg.pdf. It is this part of the circuit that is associated with leakage as it often contains a resistor divider. However the circuits I've seen have resistances closer to 3kohm which would give a more reasonable leakage.

Anyway, I've spoken with Electrex and ordered one that they assure me has a leakage of a few mA at most.


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