The Essential Guide to Winterizing Your Motorcycle: It’s Simpler Than You Think

I can already hear the scoffs and eye rolls from those of you who a) live in warm climates and don’t need to winterize your bikes, or b) live in cold climates but are tough enough to ride year-round regardless of freezing temperatures.

Save your smugness for the comments section because winter isn’t the only reason riders might park their motorcycles for an extended period. Perhaps you’re leaving for work, planning surgery, or serving time. Whatever the reason, there are steps you must take to ensure that your bike doesn’t become unresponsive when you’re ready to ride again.

Winterizing Your Motorcycle in Two Easy Steps

Protect Your Fuel

When it comes down to it, there are only two things you really need to take care of to safeguard your bike from winter troubles: the fuel in your tank and the battery under your seat.

Gasoline is the biggest threat during long-term storage. From a drop in octane to clogging up your fuel system, it can start to degrade in as little as a month depending on conditions.

Here’s what happens: the lighter molecules in gasoline (including octane, which prevents detonation) evaporate, leaving behind denser hydrocarbons. As the thinner substances evaporate, the remaining fluid oxidizes and thickens further. To make matters worse, most modern gasoline contains ethanol, which can absorb moisture from the air. While this might sound like a neat trick, having water in your tank is never a good thing.

If you have a carbureted motorcycle, you can drain the carbs and tank and store it dry. However, there’s no practical way to remove all the gas from a fuel-injected bike, so your best option is to do the opposite. Fill the tank (non-ethanol gas if you can find it) and add a quality fuel stabilizer to slow oxidation and prevent ethanol from causing problems for up to a year.

Adding stabilizer to a full tank is crucial as it minimizes air space in the tank and keeps the bare metal submerged to prevent rust. It also means you have a full range once it’s warm enough to ride again.

Connect Your Battery to a Tender

The next most likely thing to fail when your bike is parked is the battery. Most motorcycles use lead-acid batteries, which have an unfortunate tendency to self-discharge when idle. As the battery loses charge, lead sulfate crystals begin to form in the cells.

Sulfation is a normal part of the chemical process that converts lead, lead oxide, and sulfuric acid into electricity, but these crystals usually dissolve when the bike is running and current flows through the battery. If your bike sits idle long enough, sulfation can become so extensive that the battery cannot be recharged.

Fortunately, avoiding a dead battery, an unusable brick of hazardous waste, and the $100 cost of a new battery is easy. Connecting the battery to a smart charger, also known as a maintainer, float charger, or tender, will keep it properly charged and fend off sulfation. If you have a quick-connect cable attached to the battery, connecting the tender is a breeze.

Be aware that not all chargers are suitable for long-term storage. Use one that shuts off once the battery is charged and provides current only when needed. Old-school constant-rate chargers and trickle chargers provide a continuous flow of electrons and can overcharge your cells if left connected. If this is the type of charger you have, it’s best to connect it to the battery for a few hours once a month. If you don’t have power where you store your bike, remove the battery and take it inside to connect to the charger.

If your bike uses a modern lithium-ion battery, you’re in luck. Lithium-ion’s self-discharge rate is so low that all you need to do is disconnect the negative terminal. No maintainer required.

Regularly starting your bike to “circulate fluids and charge the battery” is not a good idea. Starting is when the engine is most susceptible to wear (especially if it’s very cold), and running the bike introduces moisture (a combustion byproduct) into the engine oil and exhaust parts, which will remain unless you run the bike long enough to reach operating temperature.

Okay, so with just a few minutes of effort, you’ve safeguarded your fuel and battery, and honestly, that’s all you need to do to ensure your bike starts once the snow melts.

However, as responsible stewards of our motorcycles, there are a few additional steps we can take to keep our bikes in top condition during winter storage:

1. Give Your Bike a Thorough Cleaning: Remove dirt, dead bugs, and corrosive grime. Follow up with wax for the paint, a silicone detailer for plastic parts, and a light coat of WD-40 (applied with a cloth) on chrome, polished, or anodized metal parts to protect them from corrosion.
2. Clean and Lubricate Your Chain: Feel free to be generous with the lube. The goal is to fully coat the links to prevent rust.
3. Cover Your Bike: Unless you like drawing in the dust come spring, cover your bike. An old sheet will do, but cotton can mold and attract rodents. Choose something synthetic and breathable to avoid trapping moisture.
4. Protect Against Rodents: If rodents are common in your area, seal the exhaust and airbox. A piece of heavy plastic stretched over the openings and secured with a rubber band or zip tie will keep critters out and prevent moisture from entering and corroding the exhaust internals and engine top end. Fogging your cylinders is optional but generally unnecessary unless you live near the ocean where the air is particularly humid and salty. You can also fog the inside of the gas tank to protect the metal from corrosion if storing it dry.
5. Check Fluids: Replace the coolant if it’s over two years old to ensure adequate freeze and corrosion protection. If your oil is more than halfway to needing a change, do it now. Fresh coolant and oil will be fine over winter.
6. Tire Pressure: Inflate your tires and forget about them. Seriously. Rather than worrying about flat spots this winter, focus on tire pressure during the riding season, as most people don’t check it often enough, and riding on underinflated tires is one of the worst things you can do for your bike’s handling and tire wear.

With all this done, your bike should be in great shape for its winter nap. To reiterate, draining or treating the fuel with a stabilizer and connecting the battery to a tender are the essentials. Everything else is extra credit and will help your bike emerge from winter storage in even better condition.

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