WEIZE YTX14-BS High Performance AGM Battery

better than original battery for drz400sm

Battery arrived at 13.1 volts charge and after I left it on my 1.5 amp battery maintainer, it was at full charge in an hour or two.. Battery dimensions fit just right into my 2018 HONDA CB500X. Motorcycle started up strongly and right away with this battery installed. Battery looked well made with no obvious bulging or deformations in the case and the terminals were clean and obviously new. Hardware bolts and nuts to connect bike to battery were right size and were clean and new.

My mistake is I did not notice the orientation of the Plus and Negative terminals on the battery. Turns out they were opposite of my original battery (which lasted over 6 years). Fortunately, the battery leads on my bike were long enough to connect to the battery with opposite terminal locations compared to original.

Other issue was that battery connection bolts were not quite long enough to engage the nut when the nut is sitting on the bottom of the terminal connector. I had to hold the nut up a bit with needle nose pliers to get the bolt to go into the nut. A bit awkward with battery down in bike battery box but not to troublesome.

Only question is how long will this inexpensive battery last. I keep the battery connected to my maintainer 100% of the time when I am not riding. This may be why factory battery lasted over 6 years.

Good AGM choice for Kawasaki mule; cheap, fits perfectly & connected to cables easily. Didn’t charge unit before use & machine cranked up, been using it since without problems.

terminals were backward for my motorcycle …tried everything…does not work even though application said it would….it was too late to send …so I have a useless battery sitting in my garage

Like many, many other Pacifica owners I was getting the dreaded “Start/Stop System Requires Service” notification on my wife’s 2018 van. This went on for several months and I didn’t really think much of it. I did do some reading about the system however; it looked very confusing–so I left it alone. We don’t really like the feature anyway (for those who don’t know–and yet still care to know–this is the system that allows the car to turn off at stop lights and such and then restart as soon as the driver’s foot lifts off the brake pedal. It’s supposed to save $ on gas). Then, my wife called me from Costco to tell me that her car won’t start.

She called me back about 10 minutes later and said the car had now started and that a bunch of warning lights had popped up on her dash. We now had several warning lights up on the dash: the symbol for the start/stop system (which was nothing new…this one had been on for weeks) and now the check engine light was on. Correlation is not causation but I assumed that the start/stop system had something to do with this. Great. Now I was going to have to take the thing back to the dealership and offer to trade them my first born son in exchange for making this right. First, however, I decided to do some sleuthing. Digging in to my bag of tricks, I busted out my multi-meter and tested the battery. Low and behold, it read 12.5 volts–indicating the battery was JUST hangin’ on. I tested it again a bit later and it was lower, reading 12.3, then 12.2. I figured I was probably on to something.

Here’s the (tricky) thing: these dang machines have TWO batteries! One big primary battery (the crank battery) and one small auxiliary battery (which is used by the start/stop system. You know this already because you are shopping for a small auxiliary battery and reading this review). The things is, you can’t really check the voltage of just one when they are both in the vehicle and connected in parallel. Both batteries will read the same voltage. So, I knew that one of the batteries was dead but didn’t know which one. I took a chance and ordered this battery, at the time hoping I wouldn’t have to also fork out $200 on a new primary (crank) battery. Fun story: I had to buy a new crank battery, too.

So, the new battery arrived on Sunday (yesterday) and I started disassembling the old batteries out of the van. Remember when removing a battery used to just be a strap over the battery and disconnected the negative and then positive terminals? Ha! No more! It took me darn near 45 minutes to get the two batteries out (for the record you need a 13mm and 10mm socket). The small battery has to come out first; the crank battery does not have room to come out unless you pull the auxiliary first. I got the auxiliary out and inspected it to the new replacement: they looked very similar in size and the labels indicated very similar properties in terms of capacity and such. The one big difference–and this was noted by another reviewer to my benefit–the old battery had posts mounted to each of the positive and negative terminals and the new battery had bolts that were supposed to connect through the terminal and then into a square receiving bolt. The problem was, the bolts that came with the new battery are rather short and–at first glance–don’t appear like they will work. I’m getting ahead of myself in this story but when I went to put the new battery in I was able to make these bolts/nuts fit by cutting a rubber band in half, folding the rubber band over itself to about 3/8″ height, and then squeeze the square receiving nut into the battery terminal with the battery under it. This pushed the receiving nut up and tight against the underside of the terminal and made it so that when I pushed the bolt down through the terminal the threads would catch. Saved me from buying longer bolts (a savings of probably 50 cents–still, it worked!)

Now that I had the auxiliary battery out and it looked like it would work, I decided to pull the main battery and take it to an auto parts retailer to have them check it. The first one I drove to closed literally as I pulled in (because of course it did). The second, an Autozone, checked the battery for me: they measured it at 75% cranking power while at full charge and labelled it “dead.” Gone are the days of a battery slowing dying; cars now are entirely electronically controlled. My suspicion is that if the car reads a certain level of battery it just stops working. There is no slow turning of the starter like on older vehicles. The Pacifica seems to be especially hard on batteries and so won’t take anything but the battery’s very best. Once performance falls below a certain point it is “dead” for all intensive purposes. $203 later, I had a new battery with a 36 month warranty.

I took the new battery home, installed the big/crank battery first, then the auxiliary battery (then removed them both again because I had put the crank battery in backward). I reversed the multitude of cable connections to the battery exactly as they were before and…it worked! After a few miles of the car telling me the start/stop system was unavailable because the battery was charging, it became available and I had the joy of being able to turn up my music with the windows down so that everyone around me could listen to what I was listening to without the annoyance of the engine idling. I bet I looked PRETTY cool in my mini-van. With functioning start/stop.

Long story short, this battery worked for what I bought it for. I have no idea how long it will last but–considering all other options for this battery are well over $100–even if I have to replace it twice, or even three times, as often, I still won’t be losing much by giving it a try. I’ll update this review if it fails ridiculously fast.