Quote:
Originally Posted by Trip
It's the amps you are hammering on the battery, while not enough to finish your battery quickly, it decreases the life of your battery drastically. Say you are getting 3-5 years out of a battery, you may see 1-2 years out of it with the HIDs. An incandescent bulb does have an in rush current, but it's not nearly as much as the chinese HID ballasts, you can find ballasts that are much lower current draw at start up, but the thin ones tend to be high current draw ones. Not only are you putting this extra current on the battery before start up, but during startup so you are hammering the battery twice with this extra current. Where as you really only do it once with a Incandescent because the temp of the bulb doesn't really change all that much during start so the inrush is not an issue on the incandescent, where as the ballast has to recharge to fire again.
As for the Imax of those HID ballasts being 15A, I may test mine and see what it actually is. I got an old battery and an ammeter. My ballasts are sitting in the garage not being used.
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Oh yea? Well my ballasts were made in Germany for your information AND I'd like you to do an amps test on a halogen bulb. I found one goofy site that says they pull 17A and another that claims 6-8, either way, I'm not sure how pulling a few more amps for a minute or less and then going down to about 3 amps for the rest of the time is WORSE than pulling 6-17 amps ALL OF THE TIME!!!
Besides, I've had HIDs on my bike since it was almost new and I don't have any problems in 30,000+ miles on the stock battery. Heck, before HIDs I had Osram Xtra bulbs which pull a truckload of amps. I think it's 8-10 but I'll have to check. Regardless, you have to concede my original premise that HIDs pull less power no matter how you slice it! Shit man I don't claim to be an engineer but how does a 55W/9A draw compare to a 35W/15A draw anyway?
I'd also imagine that you also believe that 100W bulbs are battery killers as well since they must dram a butt load of amps, right?
Oh and everyone with HIDs turn on your bike and wait for the bulb to heat up. Time it. Now turn the key off and right back on and see if it takes that long the second time....