new premium battery user
 

So I got tired of standard wimpy cranking, and upped the game by $30.00 at Walmart.

Sealed battery!...my 1st in a bike.

In your experience; are these reliable, trustworthy, long in life, generally speaking?

If I can trust it; not filling w distilled water every once in a while would be a nice chore gone!

What's been your experiences?

Was blown away by about 4 times the cranking speed I've been used to!

I have no experience with bikes, but why wouldn't you use an SLA battery?

They are much more sensitive to being over charged, so if your charging system is crude or out of spec it can ruin the battery right off, also because it's not flooded, when it vents there is no way to get it back and if you live in a cold part of the country some of the sealed batteries don't like getting below -20F, so if you store your motorcycle in an unheated garage the winter alone can destroy the battery in one bitter cold night.

But for a lot of people sealed batteries should work just fine, most people don't water their battery anyway.

Of the many bikes I have owned - old, new, big, small - I have never had a battery that worked poorly. They either worked or did not work. And I have never watered my bike battery, as they typically don't need it if they are healthy. Your SLA battery should work brilliantly. You can buy lithium motorcycle batteries now too.....

Ryland: all bike charging systems are crude. The flywheel A/C generator is always charging full blast and when the voltage reaches the regulating point, it shorts to ground inside the rectifier/regulator. A huge waste of energy. This is why the rectifier/regulator has massive fins and are usually just below the temperature of the sun (especially when you ride with the revs high), and also why they are the one thing that seems to continuously fail on a motorcycle.

The GoldWing battery bit the dust; after shopping and finding the expected insane motorcycle battery prices, I took a battery out of one of the cars and put it in one of the saddlebags on the GoldWing. It has NEVER cranked over so fast! :eek:

There's a lot of individual variation in bikes as far as proper charging or overcharging; some charge to more optimum levels than others but all that I've ever owned tended to overcharge thus requiring adding water to the cells periodically.

I had a battery that worked poorly, in a sense. When it was dying, it had enough charge only for a single crank. If the bike didn't start - so much for normal starting. Bump starts still worked, tough. Of course I replaced it as soon as I realized the problem.

I've had a sealed Yuasa battery in my bike.
It took at least 8 years of abuse, including many months of just sitting there, being drained down.
Recharged it, and fired up the bike. Never any battery-issues at all.

After about 6 years or so, I finally got a battery tender, and kept it warm & hooked up.

I no longer have the bike, so I don't know how long it lasted after that.

I like AGM batteries in Atv/ motorcycles. They just take the abuse better.

Thanks for the responses! I looked into the SLA online batteries. Sounded good, but I wanted the battery right away on a weekend, and Walmart was an easy choice!

Very happy so far; time will tell.

It seldom gets below 32 degrees here, and the battery would probably be resting in the house then anyway.