I recently planning on riding my motorcycle from Boston to Philadelphia to pay a visit to an ill relative. I made it there in the end, but there were many bumps in the road which made the trip quite an adventure. I learned some important lessons which might benefit others, and some people might find the story entertaining, so here’s what happened.
I had a doctor’s appointment scheduled for the morning of the trip, so my plan was to pack up all my stuff, ride to the appointment, and leave from there for Philadelphia. However, when I went out to my bike, all packed and geared up and ready to ride, I discovered that the battery was dead because I’d left the key on in the ignition for the several days since my prior ride. ☹️
Lesson One
Find a way to make sure you don’t forget to take your key out when you park your bike at home. Solution: I configured Tasker on my Android phone so that every time my phone stops charging wirelessly a notification pops up reminding me to remember my key. This works because the only place I use wireless charging is the phone mount on my bike.
This was not the first time I killed my battery by forgetting my key, but it was the first time with my new bike which I got in June. My old bike had a sealed AGM battery, while the new one has a flooded battery that needs to be checked and topped up periodically with distilled water.
Previous times I’d done killed the battery in the old bike, I’d recovered by recharging the battery with my battery tender enough to get the bike started. I assumed the same thing would be true this time, so I plugged the battery into the tender, took the car to my appointment, then returned home planning on leaving for the trip with the hopefully recharged battery.
This plan failed: when I got home from my appointment the bike still wouldn’t start. What I hadn’t noticed is that when I drained the battery I dried it out, so it couldn’t recharge.
Lesson Two
If you accidentally drain your flooded lead-acid battery, you’ve probably also depleted its fluid levels partially or fully, so before you try to recharge it, check its fluid levels and top them up as needed.
At this point I decided I needed to find out whether it was just the battery that was bad or there was another problem with the electrical system. To do that, I hooked up my car’s battery terminals to the bike’s, at which point I was able to start the bike, confirming that the dead battery was the only problem.
I therefore took a closer look at the battery and finally realized that its reservoirs were dry. I figured this must be why it wasn’t charging, so I came up with plan B: buy a bottle of distilled water from CVS; refill the battery reservoirs; go to the auto parts store, buy a jump-start battery pack, charge it up, confirm that I am able to jump-start the bike with it, and then take it with me on the trip. I figured the battery would recharge during the long ride to Philadelphia, and until it did, I could jump-start the bike as needed. Furthermore, since my departure from Boston had now been delayed by so many hours that I wasn’t going to make it to Philadelphia in time to visit my relative in the hospital at a reasonable time, I figured that once I got far enough to confirm that my plan was going to work, I would go online on my phone and reserve a hotel room outside Philadelphia for that night, then pay my visit the next morning before heading home.
As I hinted at above, I also have a car, which I should have decided at this point to take on the trip instead of the bike. This was a dumb plan, but I was sufficiently invested in wanting to do the trip on my bike that I threw caution to the wind and proceeded. Frankly, the relative I was going to visit was not terribly close, so the allure of making the trip by bike and the dramatically lower fuel cost were necessary to convince me the trip was worth making. Even dumber: although I found that I was able to jump-start the bike with the pack, I couldn’t do it reliably, and I couldn’t figure out why sometimes I was able to and sometimes not, and yet I still proceeded.
Lesson Three
For God’s sake, if your motorcycle isn’t working reliably, don’t take it on a long trip! This is all the more true if you have another vehicle you can take instead.
So, off I went on my jump-started bike, still expecting my battery to recharge on the way, and still not realizing that it wasn’t going to because it was completely dry and probably ruined. I kept the bike running for about an hour, stopped at a service plaza to use the bathroom and get gas, planning as described above to jump-start it if necessary to get it back on the road.
At this point I decided my plan had worked well enough so far that it was safe to commit to the rest of the trip, so I reserved and paid for a hotel room for the night as I had planned; this way I had a specific location for the night to aim my navigation app at. This was a mistake: I was only an hour away from home at this point, so if there was a new problem I could turn back without losing anything but some time, but paying for the hotel room increased the stakes and therefore made me more committed to proceeding even it proved unwise, which, as you’re about to read, it did. There isn’t a new lesson here, I don’t think, it’s just me continuing to make the same poor decision to proceed when I should have turned back.
After reserving the hotel room, I went to jump-start the bike so I could drive it over to the gas pumps and fill it up, and I couldn’t get it to start. After trying, failing, and swearing many times, I had to concede that my plan was not going to work, so I made plan C: find a nearby motorcycle repair place with the right battery in stock, get towed there, install a new battery, and get back on the road to Philadelphia. I found a shop within AAA’s towing radius, called them up, confirmed that they could do an emergency battery replacement, and then called AAA for the tow.
Because I was in a plaza on the Massachusetts Turnpike, AAA transferred me to the State Police, who dispatched one of the towing companies they work with for the tow.
While I was waiting for the two truck to show up, I managed to jump-start the bike successfully. I still hadn’t figured out why I couldn’t get it to work every time. Nevertheless, when the tow truck arrived (relatively quickly), I told them never mind, I figured it out, I don’t need a tow, and I sent them away. Honestly, I don’t know what the heck I was thinking. At this point I think I was just stubbornly determined to make this trip work, because that would validate all of my earlier decisions. I fell prey to some serious sunk-cost fallacy thinking.
But after the tow truck left, I once again couldn’t get the bike to jump-start again. Once again, there were many tries and failures and much swearing, after which I gave up and called the tow company back. This time it took well over an hour for them to arrive.
When they arrived, they refused to tow me to the motorcycle shop and said the best they could do was tow me about nine miles to the nearest Turnpike exit and leave me in a gas station parking lot at that exit, at which point I could call AAA and ask them to tow me where I wanted to go. For this, they charged me the literal highway-robbery fee of $325. The driver claimed AAA would fully reimburse me, which was an outright lie; AAA only subsequently reimbursed me for half of the fee, making various excuses for why the rest was not reimbursable.
Lesson Four
Getting towed from the Massachusetts Turnpike is a scam, for two reasons:
1) AAA claims that they are “required” to transfer such tows to the State Police, but that’s a lie; they are only required to transfer “involuntary” tows, but mine was voluntary since I was safely parked at a service plaza. Legally, AAA could have sent one of their own trucks, which wouldn’t have cost me anything and would have towed me to the motorcycle shop, but they refused.
2) the companies that tow vehicles from the Turnpike rip people off, and there’s really no recourse. A fee of $325 was ridiculous for towing me nine miles, not to mention fraudulent, since the way they justified it was by inflating the mileage of the tow on the invoice.
When I was still at home deciding whether to proceed with the trip on the bike, I definitely did so under the assumption that if worst came to worst I could get towed by AAA and it wouldn’t cost me anything. There’s a good chance I would have changed course if I’d known that wasn’t the case.
So here I was, stuck in a gas station parking lot off of the Massachusetts Turnpike an hour from my house with a bike I (thought I) couldn’t start. It had now been hours since I had spoken to the motorcycle shop, so I called them again to confirm that they could still put in a new battery, before sking AAA to tow me there. They put me on hold for a few minutes and then came back and said, “Sorry, it turns out we don’t actually have a battery in stock for your bike. We might be able to get one for you by tomorrow if you’d like.” Well, fuck.
It was only now, in desperation, stranded in a parking lot after being stranded for nearly two hours in the service plaza and paying the towing company $325, that I finally figured out how to make the jump-start pack work reliably.
Lesson Five
You can’t jump-start a motorcycle through the SAE connector attached to your battery; it won’t carry enough amperage for the jump to succeed.
But wait, there’s more…
Lesson Six
If your jump-start pack has a safety sensor which prevents it from working if it can’t sense any current at all in the battery, and the pack has an override for the safety sensor, then you have to do the following steps in the following order to make the jump-start work.
1) Turn the ignition off.
2) Turn on the pack and enable the safety sensor override.
3) Connect the pack to the battery terminals.
4) Start the bike.
5) Disconnect and turn off the pack.
The most important thing here is to override the safety sensor before you connect the pack to the battery.
At this point, knowing that I would be able to reliably jump-start my bike as needed, and knowing what a huge pain of ass it was going to be to call AAA and have them tow my bike all the way home, I came up with plan D, which was frankly the first decent plan I had since embarking on this adventure: proceed to the hotel for the night as previously planned, and go to an auto-parts store in the morning and get a new battery before going into the city to visit my relative.
That plan worked without a hitch. The next morning, I went to an AutoZone near the hotel, they had a compatible battery in stock, we filled the reservoirs, they charged the battery for me while I sat in the parking lot reading my email, I installed it into my bike, the bike started with no trouble, and AutoZone took the old battery off my hands and therefore didn’t charge me the “core charge” for the new one. The guy at AutoZone who helped me was great, 10/10 would recommend. The only bummer was that I was hoping to replace the flooded battery with a lower-maintenance sealed one, but unfortunately, none of the sealed motorsport batteries that AutoZone had would fit in my bike’s battery compartment. 🫤
From this point forward the trip was uneventful, and I haven’t forgotten the key in my bike since I set up the reminder on my phone. One final lesson, though:
Lesson Seven
Check the fluid levels in your battery regularly, at least every 500 miles, and make sure to keep the level in each cell between the low and high fill lines, to avoid killing the battery.
