Over the past few weeks, I started to develop a strange issue. Out of nowhere, the battery would decide to die, to the point where it wouldn’t turn over. This would happen whether it had been sitting in the garage and I just rolled it out or even on the move. Certain electrical components would fade away one by one. First the brake light, then the neutral light on the dash, then the dash itself, then the headlight, and finally the engine would die. This happened to me just as I got home from a ride, so I was able to capture it on the gopro.
I’m not an expert in electrical, so I didn’t know right away what it was. I actually had a similar issue with the DRZ a year or so ago, ended up being a fried connection to the rectifier. So first course of action was to check all of my connections. To be safe I unclipped all major connections to the battery and sprayed it with some electrical connection cleaner. After I recharged the battery, I hooked up a volt meter and let it run. The volts to the battery slowly started to go down, like .5 volts every few minutes. I rode it around a bit and did this again, it was lower still. When flipping the high beams and hitting the horn (sorry neighbors), the volts dropped faster and never picked back up. It got down to 9 volts when the brake light faded out.
Since I didn’t fix this with the connection cleaning, I started to look at charging systems. The rectifier looked ok, nothing looked burnt out. The stator on the other hand…
I can believe I missed this, I had just done the cam chain tensioner so I had the stator cover off! Something fried in there, so I guess it wasn’t giving charge back to the battery, or at least giving minimal charge. Thankfully I had my old stock stator laying around. Someone mentioned that the SF grom stator was cheaper and better, so I had replaced mine with a 2017 model.
So if you have an OG grom and ever need to replace your stator or rectifier, or want to go LED, just buy an SF equivalent. They’re cheaper and direct plug and play.
