Hi all, have a very frustrating issue on my 1198. I’ll try and be as detailed as possible as need to get to the bottom of this, so apologies for the long post. Bike had a new genuine reg/rec and new yuasa battery in July 2018 and had no issues since. I added exactstart cables at the same time and ever since, starting and charging has been no issue. I fitted garmin sat nav charge cables this week, put the bike together and checked the battery voltage with multimeter - 12.8v. Turned ignition on and got a crank sensor fault code. Checked all my connections, all good, noticed that the dash only showed 12.0v Put the battery on charge with oxford optimiser and the voltage on the charger was jumping around all over the place. Eventually got the battery to charge at a steady rate. After 30 mins I fired the bike up, it ran fine on idle, but if I touched the throttle it instantly died. Took the battery off and had it tested at Halfords, they said it had a faulty cell. Next morning I again checked it on bike, with ignition on you could see the bolts dropping like a stone....12.4, 12.3, 12.2, 12.0 dead. Took the battery off and dropped it at a yuasa dealer for the warranty claim, they said they would test it and get back to me. I had to use the bike for a holiday so rushed into buying a brand new yuasa battery, fitted it to the bike, it fired up, I checked it was charging, so rode 200 miles to wales without a hitch. However, now had a phone call from yuasa distributor saying old battery is fine, no issues. Just went down and checked bike, 13.0v battery with multimeter, turn ignition on and 12.5v...12.4v....12.3v... all within ten seconds. Any ideas what is going on? Old battery showed the symptoms of a dead cell but yuasa claim it’s fine? Why is my volts dropping like a stone with ignition on a 24hour old fully charged battery? I need to get to Austria on this bike in 4 weeks time and every time I plan to use it, it throws up some new electrical issue
Disconnect the battery form the bike and retest as a start. If it does the same then the battery is ng, if it stops dropping there is a drain or short on the bike
I'm assuming that all the readings with the new battery were taken with the multimeter and not the dash. If it is I agree with @Robarano it's not impossible to get 2 bad batteries, did you use the same supplier? Bad batch? I'd also do what he suggests and get the battery off the bike charge and test it separately to confim/eliminate that as a cause If the Voltage dropped from 13 to 12.3 in 10 seconds then I can only think a bad battery or one helluva short. If it is real then there would have to be something sinking a lot of energy (the only thing I can think of is the solenoid but that's just theory)and it's doubtful the bike would run
start pulling fuses with your multi meter connected to the battery. see it you can tie down the circuit that's draining the battery.
I think this sounds like a negative earth fault rather than the battery or Garmin install, I would check the earth strap first because it would throw up the engine error code. Having a new battery and getting a dud is un heard of these days especially from Yuasa who sell thousands of units and have measures in place to make sure dud units do not go out of the factory being world leaders in batteries. You need to either read direct from the battery the voltages to ascertain this also, but the earth route is my indication of the fault.
The dash is always reading 0.5 to 0.6v lower than the battery shows with a multimeter. The 12.4 and lower readings were read from the dash. The 12.8 and higher readings were with the battery removed, charged and tested with multimeter. 1st battery was July 2018 and purchased in Germany. Second battery is April 2019 and purchased in Halfords U.K. so I don’t think there will be a batch issue Garnin leads are only like battery fly lead-so I don’t think they can pull any current until sat nav is clipped into the housing and pulls current. I think best option is to start pulling fuses as you said and see what the current draw is. Just seems like the fuel pump and headlight are doing the damage, and it shouldn’t pull the voltage down so fast
Earth or connection fault was my first guess, so I cleaned all connections with wire wool and electrical cleaner, then reassembled it all. With having the upgraded cables Iv ruled out one of the leads breaking down internally or building resistance.
The full kit from exact start were fitted summer 2018. They were piggybacked to the existing oe Ducati cables.
Crank position errors sometimes show up from the fuel pump resistance being to high, is the 1198 Canbus system?
Some Ducati's have the battery wires spliced into the main loom - where this happens I design the cables to piggy back the original cables so people don't have to cut into the loom. Where the cables are separate they are simply replaced...
