I got a question regarding batteries. In winter when I don’t ride my motorcycle, my battery drains bit by bit and if I don’t charge it, it’s dead after a few months.
What happens if I disconnect it and take it out? Does the battery still drain, but less? Does it not drain at all?
In: Engineering
A disconnected battery won’t drain at all. Draining happens when the battery is still connected to a load; if you disconnect the battery (you don’t even need to take it out of the bike; disconnecting the cables will suffice), it’s no longer using power and it won’t drain.
A lead-acid battery will have a slow intrinsic self-discharge rate, even when it’s not connected to anything. It happens because of the internal chemistry.
So it has to be maintained with a proper charger, if it’s left for many months. If the battery sits around with a partial discharge, the internal chemistry causes irreversible sulfation of the plates. That lowers the battery’s capacity & max output current. Degraded plates can later lead to rapid self-discharge & even dead cells.
It depends on a lot of factors, like temperature, but there is resistance and chemical reactions occurring in a disconnected battery that causes it to discharge – this is given off as heat (a very small amount of heat over a very long relative time period)
All batteries lose their charge over time. The specifics of the chemistry involved differ from one kind of battery to another but a battery’s charge is just its ability to move free electrons from one side to the other and by its very nature a battery is in an unstable state.
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