Winterising bikes

You can buy battery maintainers which are just trickle chargers with a few smarts. Optimate is the obvious choice but there are others. Something like that you could just leave plugged in until next year. Depending on which datatool you've got (mine's got an old Veto and its greedy) you may find that charging once a fortnight is a better bet. The older alarms can be a bit thirsty.

Don't know if it applies to you but the Lithium batteries stand up better to vampire sources like alarms but you must be careful not to let them get totally discharged otherwise they can die completely. With one of these you'd probably only need to charge it once or twice for the whole winter and then just to be on the safe side.

To prevent your crank shells from getting eaten away by the acids in the old oil I would always suggest changing the oil and getting up to temperature before putting into storage for 6 months :thumbup

Changed the oil less then 500 miles ago thanks for the advice my datatool is the duo and I've put it on a optimate now thanks folks for the advice ��

I put a little fuel stabilizer in the tank. I agree with Sam, store it with clean oil in it.

In cold climates I used to disconnect the battery from the bike and use a teensie wall-blob type trickle charger on a lamp timer so it only turned on for 1 hour every day.

But here in a warmer climate I leave the battery connected to the bike and I use a smart charger on an external plug so I can just take off anytime.

But I'm about to use my lithium battery for the first time...no routine yet but I did get the super-duper special charger with lines to each cell.