Lights drain battery on sidecar outfit

[RDfella]

Didn't get all this bother with acetylene lights. I'm currently in the process of fitting diodes to prevent feed-back from the tail light to head beam etc due to the way the light switch is configured.

[Triton Thrasher]

My LED oil pressure light “bright idea” flashed in time with the alternator.

[owain]

Great to hear how other outfit riders have found it. I decided to order a 12v armature and coil for the dynamo now. It seems that a properly working 6v and 12v dynamo can do the job fine. Although I liked the idea of a 12v dynamo cutting in sooner in order to charge a 12v system. Hopefully I won't come to regret the decision! In hindsight, replacing the lights with LEDs and checking my wiring to the taillight (i.e. making sure the stop light wasn't on all the time) may have done the job but reliability is really what I'm after. It's not too nice riding in the middle of nowhere with no-lights.

[RogerSB]

On mine, stuff lit up when I put the brake light on.

When riding solo I changed to LEDs without any problems (bear in mind I still had a BPF Quartz Halogen in headlight) but after fitting the sidecar and swapping its bulbs for LEDs when I applied the brake the pilot and speedo lights came on as well  . If I put a normal incandescent bulb (I used the 2.2W speedo bulb) in the system all worked ok.  In the end I changed the sidecar's LED stop light to one from Paul Goff and then it was ok.  The fun started when I fitted indicators, also from Goffy. I was also using a high quality electronic relay from Classic Car LED's but still they wouldn't flash correctly. The sidecar side was fine but the bike side flashed intermittently  .  Even more puzzling was the fact that the indicator's wiring circuit was completely separate from the bike's wiring, except for battery live and earth connection to frame.  Also to confuse the issue they performed faultlessly without the engine running and that led me to believe it must be interference from the magneto or HT leads (even Paul Goff thought that). What solved it was removing the indicator's earth connection from the frame's main earth bolt (under seat) and connecting it straight to the battery earth terminal - and it's been working faultlessly all this year  .