A few people have noticed that the Podtronics combined regulator/rectifier has a parasitic drain on the battery when the bike is sat in the shed.

I have verified this myself and can confirm that it draws just under half a milliamp when everything on the bike is shutdown.

This has been verified by Jean Des Rosiers in a post that you can read here.

Let’s just get into context how much of a (non) issue this is.

If you take a low spec battery like the standard one on a pre-MK3 Norton Commando – the Yuasa YB9B, it’s capacity is 9ah

So with the parasitic current draw of a Podtronics, it will take over a year to drain the battery to half it’s capacity.

If that’s an issue – I feel the easiest way to deal with the ‘problem’ is to simply put the bike on a tender (charger) every six months (don’t forget to take the battery off the bike, or remove the fuse when you charge it)

I see no parasitic power drain with the original Zener or the Shindengen units that I like to use (compared to the 0.5mA of the Podtronics short-type unit)

There must be some, but it doesn’t register either on the Fluke nor my analogue AVO (which is far more sensitive)

There is an alternative if you want to take the issue of parasitic drain out of the picture altogether.

That is to relocate the Podtronics to the other side your ignition switch and treat it like the other consumers on the bike.

The only downside to doing this is that you will be reliant upon having the kill switch on your handlebars in order to cut power to your ignition at the end of a ride.

Here is a factory wiring diagram with the Podtronics unit added into the alternative location PNG 3066×1841

As I said before, for me, personally I don’t feel that this is an issue at all. If your battery goes flat over six months (you car would do the same by the way), just give it a charge the night before you go for a ride.

I hope this will prove to be useful to someone!