Newby riding in cooler weather clothing question.

Real honestly, I'll have to go look again. The grips were
installed ~10 years ago by a previous owner.

I'd expect that the grips would run from the fused circuitry,
while the regulator appears to be running directly from the
unfused diode board on the charging system.

OTOH, the wiring's been hacked at by a long line of bozos.
I'm only the most recent one. Thanks for the thoughts.

 

In this case, there are two 400 watt upgrades and
one 800 watt upgrade available for the bike. 280 watts
would be a little marginal for ~160 watts of gear and
the normal draw of the lights and ignition. I've also
got 100 watts of running lights that I can't run full
time.

One other thing I really like about one of the available
upgrades is that it's a permanent magnet rotor with a
RR combo. This package has half the parts count of the
energized rotor package and of this reduced parts count,
the only one that's likely to go wrong is the $100 RR.

The stock system has a $100 rotor, $30 brush set, $100
diode board, $30 regulator and lots of wires running all over.
I lost a whole rally weekend troubleshooting this mess,
only to find that the problem was a $12 3-wire cable between
the stator and diode board.

Agreed that there's **probably** enough power at speed.
I like the idea just for the temperature regulation, but I'd
also like to have more watts to spare.

Like I said, KISS principle says brute force beef up the watts.

 

If what you're describing what is true, it sounds like you
need to rip all the wiring out and fix it anyway. If so go
for the upgrade. KISS applies to the wiring in my opinion
more so than the upgrade.
Go for it. It's what you want to do anyway.

Clay

 

The grips are clearly not wired directly into the charging circuit.
I've been through that one enough to know. The bike has
two stock wires to +12, a fat one for charging and a smaller
one to drive lights, ignition, etc. It's clearly wired into that
circuit and controlled by a relay, as it won't draw down the
battery when the key's not turned on. Where exactly is
something I don't recall, if I ever knew.

The regulator draws +12 straight out of the diode board
and appears to be well isolated from other circuits.
The path to battery +12 is pretty clean too. 3 wires from
stator to diodes, single wire from diode board to starter
terminal, fat wire from starter to +12.

Only place I've ever seen problem were in the 3 wire AC
hookup and the battery grounds, though I maybe ought to
swap the diode to starter wire out too just on general principals.

 

I'm not 100% sure there's a problem to be found or more
watts to be wrung out. Could be just plain underpowered,
but a couple tests for voltage drop are certainly a good idea.

Thanks

 

Any voltage drop will get translated into heat at 100% efficiency.
Some of that heat might be other than where you actually want it ;-)

Greg.P.

 

As I'd said, without the heated grips or aux lighting, it'll bring
the battery to 14 volts at highway speeds and stop driving the
battery discharge light about 1400 RPM. For that particular
charging system design, I'm not so sure there's much more
to be wrung out of it.