It was long, cold winter. Every day I walked into my garage and saw my Enertia, sitting quietly, fully charged, ready for even a momentary break in the weather.
Sometimes, I'd go up to it and start it up, just to hear the sound and read the dash, which always comforted me with the news: 99% charged. Little did I know that my melancholy obsession with reading the state of charge would harm my beloved bike.
Apparently, one time that I did the old start-up routine, I turned the bike off and, (my guess here, but it's as good as any) turned the key to "charge" and then back to "off" . . . except I went past "off" and left the key in the "on" position. For a couple of weeks.
The next time I went to check on the bike, I turned the key (hmmm, must have left it "on", I'll just turn it off and then on) and hit the start button. The dash showed a H34 fault code, which, according to the owner's manual, required me to contact Brammo. BrammoJen got back to me within a couple of hours and had about 8 steps of diagnostics to help her track down the problem. Step 4 required me taking off the body panels, which I'd always wanted to do. In this step, she said:
This step depends on how comfortable you are with taking off the body panels. If you feel comfortable and have your owner’s manual go to page 55 and follow the instructions. If you don’t feel comfortable taking them off let me know and I will talk to Danny about coming to diagnose and fix your bike.
I followed all the steps - the early ones required basic things like turning the key to "on" making sure the lights were on, kicking up the kickstand, reading the dash to see if any additional codes came up, etc.
The later steps required me to unhook the blue plug (main power connect to the batteries) and to undo some other connections prior to checking some fuses. Once I had done all this and none of the fuses were blown, she determined that it was probably one of two parts that were more challenging to replace, and so she ended up coming out for a service visit the next week.
As it turned out, the parts did not need to be replaced. When she got to my house and started looking at the logs (via the USB key under the seat), she saw what I had done. I'm not sure why she didn't have me just send her the logs, but perhaps the fault code didn't lead her to that conclusion. Once she looked at the logs and figured out that I had left the bike in the "ON" position, she fixed it by pressing a sort of "reset" button that is near the front of bike (the body panels are off) and up by the forks. This had a little LED that was glowing red. She held the reset button for a long time... like two or more minutes?...and it turned green.
So, what problem did I cause by leaving the bike "ON"? I wish she'd come here and explain (I'll ask her to), but what it did was drain the "pre-charge" to the point that the bike's systems disabled themselves to protect the batteries.
The next time I take the body panels off, I will take a picture of the "reset button."
