Battery drain through the regulator

[Anonymous]

Hiya All,
I've owned my GS 650L for 2 years and it has been a fantastic bike, but lately there has been a bit of a problem with the RR, when I turned the Bike on one morning the battery was dead, something was earthing overnight when the ignition was off, so I traced the leak to the RR, could there be another explanation as the RR is only 6 mths Old, and once the battery was trickle charged overnight the biked worked fine and was happy to run for hours and hours, the Stator was not earthing so no problems there, just the RR, is it possible that there should be no live wires going to the RR when the engine+ ignition is Off? there is no melted bits and the wires look fine, but once I disconnect the ground from the frame the Battery is Isolated and not earthing ... Any help would be appreciated, This is my Very first post here.

[focus frenzy]

If you have disconected the RR and that stoped the battery from going dead overnight, then the RR is bad.
ocasionaly rectifiers do fail and will leak power back through the sator draining a battery overnight
age has nothing to do with it, new ones do fail.
disconect the three stator wires and with the battery connected, check for voltage at each wire coming from the regulator rectifier, if you read any voltage on any of the three wires, you have a bad reg/rect and this is where you are loosing power.

PS: the reg/rect has power to it at all times through the red wire

[Anonymous]

Thank you so much for your Immidiate reply, I really thought I was going to wait till tommorow..
I just checked and the only place that electricity is leaking out of is the ground wire, none of the others are leaking (except, maby though the ground wire there) but is is only that one single gound wire, and none other.. so think of it as this, 4 wires and 1 ground, with everything connected and the battery put in, simply disconnecting the ground wire from the RR to the fram will completely Isolate the Battery. so I aggree that the problem lies in the RR somewhere but why does the bike work fine once running?? surely the RR should melt, blow up or something, why is it continuing to allow a good charge to go through the battery?
Always in appreciation for your advice.

[focus frenzy]

not necessarily, I have seen plenty of alternators that charge perfectly but due to a bad piece of electronics, will allow a slow drain on the battery but not enough to burn out the alternator.
these bikes have fairly small batteries, so a small drain, even less than a amp will drain the battery overnight.