The neighbor across the street and one house over either has a motorcycle or has a friend/relative with a motorcycle. Every so often there’s a motorcycle sitting in the driveway idling, usually at night, usually for 15 minutes to a half hour.
Tonight, the bike was there idling for an hour, literally. And then a 15 minute break, then another 15 minutes before they took off (and beeped their horn). All of this was between 11:45 PM and 12:15 AM on a Friday. Our neighborhood is residential, suburban.
I don’t care about loud pipes driving by, and while I grit my teeth when the dirtbike kids race behind my house, but none of that is as bad a incessant, loud idling that goes on and on and on. I think about 5 minutes is my limit before I start getting a headache.
I know that the neighbor has a garage full of tools and people stop by for him to fix their cars. Is there some sort of mechanical reason to let your bike idle for an hour? Like, finding a leak or something? I don’t even know why you’d leave a car running for an hour.
And why at midnight? I looked out the window and all I saw were glowing green and orange bikes. Seriously, they had LEDs all over their bikes. Do you need to idle the engine to make the LEDs glow?
Could be they’re just douchey. I never notice any other sort of douchey behavior from these neighbors at all, so I like to imagine they have a douchey friend who comes over and leaves his bike idling in the driveway. But I’d like to know why.
Motorcycle have little spare capacity in the battery and charging system compared to a car.
If for some reason they wanted the bike’s lights on, the engine must be running otherwise the battery would be dead very quickly.
No excuse for the time of night, though.
If this idling goes on at that late hour and the pipes are loud, go over there and talk to him about it.
I had a neighbor once who would run his rock-crawler for over an hour at 03:00ish. I went and talked to him about it. Turns out he works 2nd shift at the local factory. He did not realize how loud it was. The next night it happened, I got out of bed in my skivvies and, walking through the snow, I got him to come over to my place and stand in my bedroom. He fixed the problem that night. I suspect he put mufflers on it when he worked on it at night. Or maybe he worked on it when I was at work. In any case the problem was solved.
I do understand some folks hesitation at confronting a neighbor. Not everyone is a big ugly biker-looking guy. He also probably thought that I was a mite on the insane side. These attributes have come in handy at times.
I now live out of town a ways, partly due to this kind of stupidity/thoughtlessness.
The time of night is pretty disrespectful. I can’t imagine why it would need to idle for that long. After I start my Stella 2-stroke, I let it idle for maybe 2-4 minutes before I head out, but never more than that. If this were to happen often, I would talk to them if I were you.
Probably just a moron. There is a not insignificant subset of motorcyclists who are less about performance or skill than image, and having a loud machine plays into that. These are the guys riding huge cruisers who sit and BRAAAAAP their engines at stop lights for no reason whatsoever. My guess is the guy just wants to listen to his bike run so he can fantasize about being a badass biker.
I have a water-cooled, carbed twin, and I don’t idle it for more than thirty seconds before taking off. Just leave it on choke for the first couple of minutes in the cold and it’s set.
The morans across the street from me used to have someone from, I guess, a carpool honking their horn incessantly until I wrote an anonymous note about calling the cops for disturbing the peace and left it in their mailbox. Problem solved.
Not that quickly. The battery is typically around 19 Amp-hours. A headlight typically draws about 5 amps, the other lights much less; you could power them nearly four hours before the battery is completely flat.
I recall hearing of some very old Harleys with an engine design such that you needed to warm them up a lot before applying significant throttle. The thermal expansion of the engine parts added the required preload to the headbolts; without that, the head gasket was prone to leaks when you got on the gas.
That, however, is an exception. Like cars, the vast majority of bikes do just fine by starting them up and heading out, using light throttle and moderate RPM for the first couple of miles.
Likely the OP’s neighbors are just inconsiderate, unaware that other people might be sleeping and/or don’t appreciate the sound of bikes idling for long periods.
Most likely the owner’s just a thoughtless prick, given the time. But, some mechanical reasons for idling the bike for a while:
-Charging a new battery. If he’s switching to a new battery, it should run up a full charge. The sensible and polite way to do so is to plug it into a battery charger, but here in Brazil standard practise is to just switch in the new battery, jump-start the bike, and idle it for an hour so the engine charges the battery. This could be connected with the LED glow issue - possibly the owner plugged in so many LEDs and other electric accessories that the battery couldn’t take it and he had to switch
-Bike needs warming up - this should only be true of old or classic carburated bikes. It’s bad practise to start up a carburated bike and drive off immediately - you’re supposed to let it warm up to normal operating temperatures before driving off. This is a matter of minutes, not an hour.
-Bike has an unidentified fault. Sometimes the driver will notice problems with the bike, such as the engine cutting out, while driving and not know right away what the problem is. A basic inspection while parked might not catch any problems, even disassembling parts. Idling the bike for a while might help diagnosing what’s wrong - if, for example, the engine cuts out occasionally while idling for extended periods but nothing else unusual happens, it’s likely an issue with fuel supply (so, degraded fuel, blocked fuel line, sediment in the tank…). It’ll also be easier to spot overheating problems (i.e. determine if the engine is heating up more than it should), problems with spark plugs, etc. If it idles fine for an hour, likely the problem is elsewhere (so, in the case of the engine cutting out, it could be an electric/electronic problem instead, for example - this happened to me just recently, as my bike would idle fine but run badly. Turned out a safety feature was cutting out the engine when it shouldn’t because of a loose switch, but only when I was in gear and higher RPMs)
I’d give them the benefit of the doubt and guess that they started the bike up to warm it up for a few minutes, then wandered off and forgot about it. I’ve certainly done that a few times.
Although one thing with water-cooled motorcycles is that because of the way the cooling system is designed, the actual coolant may take a very long time to warm up at idle. If someone misinterpreted the owner’s manual/prevailing wisdom to mean that you should “warm up” the bike until the coolant gauge actually registers something, you might actually have to let the thing idle for an hour or so.
Thanks all - this is good info. Glad it’s not 100% doucheyness for certain. I will try to be tolerant of the less-than-an-hour idle times…unless they make a habit of the extended symphony.
I have 2 bikes, both Harleys. Both air cooled and carburated, no fuel injection. Regardless of weather they have to warm up about 10 minutes or so to run right on the road.
But I’ve never let them idle more than 15 minutes. An hour is ridiculous!
Well, 15 minutes can be pretty maddening, too! I don’t know what it is about either my house or my windows or the bones in my head but the noise from the neighbor’s [friend’s?] bike really hits me hard and makes me feel not too good. So while I was not exaggerating when I said “an hour” this time, it does in fact seem like an eternity when it’s just 10 or 15 minutes, too.
Well, it does seem like there’s a degree of doucheyness involved in what you describe but yeah, there are reasons to idle.
I hated riding my 500 until I could fully push the choke in - I was inexperienced and it made me feel like the bike was running away from me. So I’d idle for a while before riding off, but we’re talking a couple of minutes, not an hour.
There is a bar across the street from our house (note: it wasn’t there when we moved in…it was a cigar shop in those days). This is a residential neighborhood in suburban Chicago; the bar and its parking lot are surrounded on three sides by houses.
We have had on-and-off issues with loud people leaving the bar late at night since it’s opened. When you’re in your cups, you’re louder than you think you are, and many patrons like to stand around outside the bar and continue their conversations before heading home, not realizing that we can clearly hear every word they’re saying from our bedroom (and also undoubtedly not realizing that their post-bar-time conversation has now awakened the neighbors).
However, the motorcycles are the worst. Thank you so very much for starting up a loud machine at 1 a.m., and letting it idle 75 feet from my bedroom window for 15 minutes before finally leaving. Yes, I do know understand why they presumably do it (a friend of mine pointed out the whole “some bikes need to warm up for that long” to me), but, honestly, it’s still pretty tactless, at best (and douchy, at worst) to take your needs-fifteen-minutes-to-warm-up bike to a bar in a residential neighborhood, then stay until closing time.
