What You Need To Know Before Buying A Motorcycle Battery

When it comes to choosing the best battery for your motorcycle, it's not as simple as you might think. From wet lead acid to AGM and lithium, they all have their pros and cons. How should you take care of them? Let’s talk about how to choose the right battery for your motorcycle

Dimensions

The first thing we have to talk about is dimensions. Now on our website you're going to be able to put in your make model and have it pull up the right battery for your specific model. If you don't have an option, what you're going to need to know is the dimensions of your battery, so you need something that fits in that spot, the width, height, and depth of the battery are keys.

Normally you can put a smaller battery in your motorcycle, but if you put a smaller battery in your battery box area, just know you need to stick something in there to take up the room so it's not bouncing around.

The other things equally or maybe even more important is where the positive and negative terminals are in relationship to the hotwire and the ground wire on your bike because those battery cables typically don't have any slack in them.

So, when you're looking at motorcycle battery, if you don't know exactly which one fits your bike, the size is important but then where the terminals are equally as important because if the positive and negative on the wrong side, the battery may deform as the acidic liquid inside boils with the extreme heat from the reaction. Also, it may spill and damage nearby components, and you may not be able to do anything about it. Now, once you've determined the size of the battery you need and where you need the terminals, we can talk about something called cold cranking amps.

Cold Cranking Amps (CCA)

Most batteries on the market will have it written right on the motorcycle battery, and it will say something like CCA. What cold cranking amps are amps that the 12-volt battery can generate at 0 degrees. The higher cold cranking amp range of a motorcycle battery is, the “stronger” it will be.

Normally larger motorcycle batteries tend to have more cold cranking amps. You can see what's required of your bike on our website and match it up from there. Having a little more on the cold cranking amps is always going to be a good thing to get that bike turned over faster.

Gel, AGM Or Lithium Battery

A 12-volt battery it's pretty much what everybody's going to need, and basically, it's going to boil down to two types of batteries like AGM battery or absorbed glass mat battery and this is a version of a lead acid battery. And, a lot of people get these confused with a gel battery.

Basically, AGM batteries are better version of a gel battery so you're probably not going to see many gel batteries out there and you're better off going with the glass matte style.

The other kind of battery is a lithium-ion battery and obviously lithium-ion technology is everywhere now. But those batteries are going to be much lighter than an AGM battery and in a lot of cases they don't take up as much space.

The downside to them are they're expensive but generally they last about twice as long as a lead acid battery and offer more cold cranking amps and a weight savings. For most of those lithium-ion batteries, you need to get a lithium-ion battery specific charger. Now most lithium-ion battery chargers will charge a lead acid battery, but don't put the old-school acid style charger on your lithium-ion battery, you can damage it!