Yes, but you can determine where the energy is coming from by monitoring current flow and voltage.

If I get time on the weekend I will do it.

Cheers

I'm not sure I would disconnect the battery to find out.
You may damage something as batteries act as great regulators.

 

Yeah I wouldn't disconnect the battery while the bike is running

 

Yes, the battery smoothes-out a lot of nastiness. Sounds like you know what you're doing.

Having both a volt meter and ammeter at your disposal is the optimum situation. As an alternate method, I was thinking about checking the battery voltage without the bike running, then starting the bike and progessively loading the circuit with a purely resistive load until the voltage matches the engine off reading...all readings would be made at about 7000RPM. You can then shut down the bike, isolate the load, measure its total resistance and figure out the rest using ohms law. [8D]

 

Just another update.

I visited the Kawi Dealer today. The owner and I took a look at some diagrams, specs and photos. It appear that the KLX250S stator is a much different animal than what was re-wound by burnrider in his tech article at Planet KLX. The stator burn rider had was for a KLX300 and had only 8 poles/windings total with two of them being used for the ignition trigger. The one the dealer and I saw in the service manual photo has 18 poles and produces 3 phase, 38VAC power. The 38VAC is fed into the rectifier/regulator and converted to 14VDC to power the lighting/electical system. Dealer seems to think the stator and reg. were beefed-up in 2001 to coincide with the addition of an always-on 55/60W H-4 Halogen headlamp...which makes sense.

I'm even more anxious than before to get to the bottom of this now. Unless Neil Action beats me to it, I'll be rigging-up something to check the output this weekend. I wll probably only check for headroom because I have no ammeter.

Oh, and I couldn't leave the dealership empty handed, so I picked up some hot grips he had on display for winter...$45.00 for the set. They came with plenty of wire, an on/off switch and some spot ties. Power consumption on these babies is only 22W. I seem to remember reading a tip on how to easily remove the stock grips, but don't seem to remember the method. I'm sure at least one of you has done it, so can you give a brutha a hand?

 

AFAIK, the trusty box cutter knife is the tool for the job...

 

Sounds like the charging system on the KLX250s will be able to power a vest with out any problem.

 

That's what I'ma thinkin too! [8D] I'll still be doing some further investigation though to see how much the system would be taxed by running the grips and vest simultaneously.

 

Here's another follow-up. It was sunny today, so I went to the storage shed a pulled out a couple of 50/60W sealed beam headlights I had pulled from my car prior to installing a muti-reflector Halogen conversion.

I pulled the side cowling to expose the battery and went to work, armed with a volt meter, a roll of wire, some splices and my newly purchased Heated Grips. I ran through few tests.

1. Made a battery voltage reading with engine off (bike had set all night): 12.8V
2. Powered -up the bike and read DC voltage at 4000RPM: 13.8V
3. Hooked the low beam filament (50W) of one of the sealed beam lights to the bike: 13.8V@4000RPM So far, so good.
4. Switched to the High beam filament (60W) of same bulb: 13.79V Still holding-up well. Yahoo! Most heated vests draw about 50W! so I have some headroom
5. Hooked-up the low beam filaments of both bulbs (100W): 12.5V As you can see, the generator is falling behind at this point
7. Hooked-up one low beam filament and one set of Hot Grips (72.5W total): 12.7V Max and fluctacting lower** That doesn't bode well for the Vest/Grips combo. Grips did get nice and toasty though! Can't wait to install them.

**While I was testing with the Hot Grips/one low beam light combination, I noticed the cooling fan was cycling of and off. Exactly when that nonsense had started, I'm not sure. However, even when the cooling fan cycled off, the generator could not recover to battery voltage (12.8V).

Keep in mind, I'm just going with the power consumption ratings provided by the manufacturers for the various loads I was using. If I had an ammeter I could more accurately determine the power consumption of each. I will dig around at work on Monday to see if they have one that will do the job.

Suffice to say that running a vest and grips at the same time will probably cause a slow discharge of the battery. With no ammeter available, I don't know how quickly the battery would drop into an unstable range, but I think it would be prudent to purchase a small voltmeter to monitor the battery level during those times that one would want to use both grips and vest.

Nobrakes, thanks for the info on HID conversions. I have found a couple of sites that sell the dual beam Bi-Xenon kits. Converting to HID should free-up about 20W which will give close to 10W of headroom even when running grips and vest simultaneously. My dealer suggested installing a cut-off switch for the headllight, but I think that would open me up for a citation or two...no thanks.

Oh, and there's more to this story. I shut the bike down to drop the temp well out of cooling fan range, so I could run one more quick test on the light/Grips combo. While I was waiting for the bike to cool, I was putting away some tools and re-arranging the shed, when I heard -in Japanese- "look dad (neighbor's 5 year old) I'm riding the motorcycle." He does this quite often, so I've kind of gotten used to it. Next, I hear "Look dad, it's smoking" shed door flies open as I race for the bike. I got there just as the insulation had burned off of my test wires...nothing/nobody else was harmed. Total damage was about $3.00 worth of wire. I figured that was a pretty good time to stop testing for the day. [8D]

After thorough research I've found out that our stator is a much different animal than the one that is being rewound by Baja Designs. They are rewinding the stator for the off road version of this bike...listed in the manual as the KLX250D. It has six total poles with two unused in stock configuration. Stock output is 27VAC at 7000RPM. Baja Designs rewinds it, using all six poles to increase the current rating. The stator for our bike -listed as KLX250E in the service manual- has 18 poles, all of which are used. Output is 38VAC, 3 phase at 4000 RPM...I don't think we would be gaining anything with a rewind...the reps at Baja Designs agree.

I think this "200W" figure various people have found is not anywhere close to 200W continuous. If you add the load I used to the ball park figures for lights, etc that are already installed on the bike, it totals out to somewhere in the neighborhood of 120-130W at the point where the generator can still hold its own. Between roughly 130-140W the battery begins to discharge. I'm using the slop factor because I'm not sure how much the CDI consumes. I didn't include the probable consumption of the fan because it normally isn't running unless I'm in stop and go traffic.

Now that I've bored most of your to death, we can return to our regularly scheduled program [&:]

 

mmmm Good job.
The only question I have relates to rpm's.
I think maximum output is at 7000 rpm.

That could make all the difference.

 

Good sluething tremor38!

One question on the headlight switch thing - is it illegal to have a switch or just illegal to run with the headlight switched off? I did install a switch on mine - I have a 12V tire pump and if/when I ever need to use it, I wanted to be able to turn the headlight off so that it doesn't compete with that. But I always run my headlight at all other times and I even run the high beam during the day for extra visibility - at least on the roads. When on the trail I generally switch to low-beam though.