Every riding season ends with a tank you did not plan. Mine usually gets filled on a grey Sunday in late October, for a ride that turns out to be the last one, and then it sits in the garage until March. That fuel — bought without a thought, on the way home — is the single thing most likely to give trouble in spring.
So instead of collecting tips on how to winterize a motorcycle, I opened the documents: four owner’s manuals from two manufacturers, ten years apart, the federal rules on what gasoline is allowed in a motorcycle and on how volatile it is allowed to be, and the page where the Environmental Protection Agency answers questions specifically about fuelling motorcycles.
What came out is not the checklist everybody publishes. Three of the four manuals tell you to do the opposite of the most common piece of winter advice. All four are silent on the second most common one — and two of them warn against it by name, giving the exact reason people do it.
What “winterizing” means, and the only manual that puts a number on it
Start with the boring question: how long does the bike have to sit before any of this applies?
Three manuals out of four refuse to say. The Suzuki SV650 opens its storage chapter with “If your motorcycle is to be left unused for an extended period of time”. The V-Strom 800DE says “When you do not intend to ride the motorcycle for a long time”. The Yamaha MT-07 says “Before storing your motorcycle for several months”. Extended, long, several: three words, no numbers.
The fourth one is the Yamaha XSR900 GP, and it is the newest of the group. Its storage chapter is headed:
Long term storage — Before storing the vehicle long term (60 days or more):
Sixty days. That is the only threshold any of these books commits to, and it is worth keeping, because sixty days is not winter — it is a busy autumn, a broken wrist, a work trip. The same manual then puts a second, much shorter threshold on the fuel alone:
If the vehicle often sits for weeks at a time between uses, the use of a quality fuel stabilizer is recommended after each fill-up.
Weeks. Not the winter: weeks between rides, all year round, at every fill-up. That sentence quietly reframes the whole subject. Winterizing is not a seasonal ritual. It is what you do whenever the gap between rides gets long enough, and one manufacturer puts that gap at a few weeks.
The tank goes away full — all four manuals say so
Here is the advice you have heard: drain the tank before winter so the fuel does not go stale.
Here is what the manuals say. Yamaha MT-07, step two of the long-term procedure:
Fill up the fuel tank and add fuel stabilizer (if available) to prevent the fuel tank from rusting and the fuel from deteriorating.
Yamaha XSR900 GP, step three:
Fill up the fuel tank, adding fuel stabilizer according to product instructions. Run the engine for 5 minutes to distribute treated fuel through the fuel system.
Suzuki SV650 and V-Strom 800DE, identical wording in both:
Fill the fuel tank to the top with fuel mixed with the amount of gasoline stabilizer recommended by the stabilizer manufacturer.
Run the engine for a few minutes until the stabilized gasoline fills the fuel injection system.
Four books, two brands, ten years apart, one instruction: fill it. Yamaha even gives the reason, and it has two halves — a full tank stops the tank rusting, the additive stops the fuel deteriorating. An empty steel tank in an unheated garage is a condensation trap; that is the part the “drain it” advice forgets.
What none of them says
I searched all four texts for every occurrence of the word “drain” near anything to do with fuel. The results: overflow hoses, the engine oil drain plug, and exactly one instruction to empty something — in the XSR900 GP, and it is not the tank:
For vehicles with a carburetor: To prevent fuel deposits from building up, drain the fuel in the carburetor float chamber into a clean container. Retighten the drain bolt and pour the fuel back into the fuel tank.
Even when a manual does tell you to drain fuel, the fuel goes back into the tank. Not one of the four tells you to store the bike with an empty tank.
The dose the manuals will not give you
Notice what both brands do with the additive: they name it and then hand the numbers to somebody else. Suzuki says “the amount of gasoline stabilizer recommended by the stabilizer manufacturer”. Yamaha says “according to product instructions”. No brand, no ratio, no millilitres per litre.
That is not laziness, it is liability, and it means the only correct dose is the one printed on the bottle you actually bought. I am not going to invent one here either — and for the same reason I am not naming a product.
The gasoline you park with is not the gasoline you rode with in July
This is the part nobody writes about, and it is written in federal regulation.
Gasoline sold in the United States has a legal ceiling on how easily it evaporates, measured as Reid vapor pressure. The rule lives at 40 CFR 1090.215, and the headline number is:
…must meet a maximum RVP per-gallon standard of 9.0 psi
That is the summer standard, with lower ceilings in specific areas and a separate allowance of one extra psi for blends containing between 9 and 10 percent ethanol. The interesting part is not the number. It is the calendar. “Summer” is a defined term, at 40 CFR 1090.80:
Summer season or high ozone season means the period from June 1 through September 15 for retailers and WPCs, and May 1 through September 15 for all other persons…
At the pump, the volatility ceiling applies from 1 June to 15 September. That is it. The tank you fill on a grey Sunday in late October — the one the bike will sit on for five months — is bought outside the controlled period, and no federal maximum on volatility applies to it.
I want to be careful about what that does and does not mean. The regulation sets a summer ceiling for air-quality reasons; it says nothing about shelf life, and there is no federal number for how long gasoline stays good. What it does establish is a fact worth knowing: the fuel you store the bike on is, by design and by law, a different product from the fuel you rode on in July. It is blended for cold starts, not for sitting still.
The 10 percent wall, written twice for two different reasons
Open any of these four manuals at the fuel page and you find the same ceiling. Yamaha MT-07:
Gasohol containing ethanol can be used if the ethanol content does not exceed 10% (E10).
Yamaha XSR900 GP, specification table: “Recommended fuel: Unleaded gasoline (E10 acceptable)“. Suzuki, in both books:
…may be used in your motorcycle if they are no more than 10% ethanol
And Suzuki frames the whole fuel page as a warranty question — oxygenated fuels that meet the requirements may be used
…without jeopardizing the New Vehicle Limited Warranty or the Emission Control System Warranty
So the manufacturer’s wall is at 10 percent, and the penalty is your warranty.
Now the second wall, at exactly the same number, with a different penalty. 40 CFR 1090.230:
No person may sell, introduce, cause, or permit the sale or introduction of gasoline containing greater than 10 volume percent ethanol (e.g., E15) into any model year 2000 or older light-duty gasoline motor vehicle, any heavy-duty gasoline motor vehicle or engine, any highway or off-highway motorcycle, or any gasoline-powered nonroad engine, vehicle, or equipment.
Read that list again. Cars get a model-year cut-off: 2000 and older. Motorcycles get no cut-off at all. A brand-new motorcycle sits in the same sentence as a twenty-six-year-old car. There is no “unless it is recent”, no “unless the manufacturer approves”. Every motorcycle, on-road and off-road, any year.
The Federal Register document that created the rule in 2011 explains why motorcycles are in there, and the reason is not emissions paperwork:
For motorcycles and nonroad products, the misfueling concerns include the potential for elevated exhaust and evaporative emissions, as well as the potential for emissions impacts related to engine failure from overheating.
The mechanism is spelled out a few pages later: ethanol carries its own oxygen, so an engine tuned for gasoline runs leaner on a blend, and older vehicles, heavy-duty engines and motorcycles
…cannot fully compensate for the change in the stoichiometric air-to-fuel ratio as ethanol concentration increases.
And the prohibition is not aimed only at refiners and gas stations. The same document says the rule applies at the retail level, to upstream fuel providers and to consumers, so that
…all parties involved in fueling gasoline-powered products would have a legal obligation to avoid misfueling…
That includes the person holding the nozzle.
The label at the pump does not say “motorcycle”
If E15 is sold at a pump, that pump must carry a label. The requirement is at 40 CFR 1090.1510: “Any retailer or WPC dispensing E15 must apply a label to the fuel dispenser” in a specified position, with content and formatting fixed by a figure in the regulation.
The wording adopted when the label was created, quoted from the 2011 rule itself, is this:
Don’t use in other vehicles, boats, or gasoline powered equipment. It may cause damage and is prohibited by Federal law.
Read it as a motorcyclist. Boats are named. Equipment is named. Your motorcycle is “other vehicles” — a category you have to know you belong to.
That was not an oversight, and this is the part I find genuinely remarkable. Somebody proposed fixing it. During the rulemaking, one commenter suggested pictograms: “sample icons of a boat, motorcycle, chainsaw, lawnmower and snowmobile, each depicted in a circle with a slash or X across the image”. The agency considered it and
…decided not to require icons for several reasons.
One reason was that icons would show only some of the products concerned, and
…a partial list would run the risk of implying that types of equipment not included on the list are suitable for E15 use.
The same logic applied to spelling out a list in words. And then, in the very next breath, one exception was made:
…including a reference to boats since many consumers may not consider boats to be either “vehicles” or “equipment.”
Boat owners were judged unlikely to recognise themselves in the word “vehicles”, so boats got named. Riders were not given the same benefit of the doubt. The word “motorcycle” appears twenty-eight times in that rulemaking document. It appears zero times on the label it produced.
The blender-pump arithmetic, and four tanks that cannot reach it
There is one more thing the EPA writes about motorcycle fuelling, and it is on a page dedicated to exactly that, last updated in April 2026. It concerns pumps where E10 and E15 come out of the same hose:
With co-dispensing pumps, E10 and E15 share a common hose and nozzle. Because E15 may still be in the hose when a customer switches to dispensing E10, the first few gallons of E10 dispensed can have ethanol percentages at levels slightly higher than 10%. A minimum purchase of 4 gallons of E10 from a co-dispensing pump ensures that the total volume of dispensed gasoline contains no more than 10% ethanol.
Four gallons. Now look at the four motorcycles whose manuals I have been quoting:
| Motorcycle | Tank (manual) | Gallons | Reaches 4 gallons? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Yamaha MT-07 | 14 L | 3.70 | no |
| Yamaha XSR900 GP | 14 L | 3.7 | no |
| Suzuki SV650 | 14.5 L | 3.8 | no |
| Suzuki V-Strom 800DE | 20.0 L | 5.3 | yes |
Three of the four cannot buy four gallons even from empty. The arithmetic is not a scandal, though, and I am not going to pretend it is one: the same EPA page says that about 200 stations in the country co-dispense E10 and E15, that most of them have dedicated E10 pumps anyway, and that
…fewer than 30 of these stations have chosen to use the 4-gallon minimum approach
out of more than 120,000 stations. So the odds of meeting one are small. What matters for the last tank of the season is simply this: if the pump is a shared-hose blender and you are putting three gallons into a motorcycle, that is the one time the ethanol content of what you are storing is genuinely uncertain — and it is the tank that will sit for five months.
The agency, incidentally, is explicit about who the rule is for. Asked why the misfueling regulations exist at all, the answer begins:
A primary reason is to protect motorcyclists…
Do not start it once a month — and this time the manual says it, not me
The most repeated piece of winter advice in every forum is to fire the bike up every couple of weeks and let it idle “to keep the battery up and the seals wet”.
Both Suzuki manuals carry a notice about that. The SV650, 2021:
Leaving the engine running for an extended period or keeping the throttle opened, without traveling, in order to charge the battery, etc., may cause the engine to overheat. Overheating may damage engine parts or motorcycle parts, and cause the exhaust pipe to change color.
The V-Strom 800DE, 2023, repeats it in shorter form, and both close with the same line:
Stop the engine if you do not intend to begin riding promptly.
The manual names the motive — charging the battery — and rules it out. A motorcycle engine, especially an air-cooled one, is cooled by moving through air. Standing still in a garage it heats up with nothing to carry the heat away, and the manufacturer tells you what that looks like when it has gone too far: a discoloured exhaust pipe.
What the manuals do ask you to repeat every month
I searched all four books for every “once a month”, “every month”, “run the engine” and “start the engine”. Inside the storage procedures, exactly two recurring jobs survive, and neither of them involves the ignition.
The first is the battery. Suzuki puts it under a heading of its own, “Maintenance during storage”:
Once a month, recharge the battery.
Yamaha says the same thing in its own words, adding a temperature window for where the battery should live. The second job is the tyres, and it only applies if the bike is on its wheels: lift it so the wheels are off the ground, otherwise
…turn the wheels a little…
once a month, to stop the tyres deforming in one spot.
The only “run the engine” inside any of these procedures happens once, at the beginning, to push the treated fuel through the system: five minutes for Yamaha, “a few minutes” for Suzuki. After that, the manuals never ask you to start it again until spring.
The battery: the manuals agree, and then hand it over
All four say to take the battery out, charge it fully, and keep charging it monthly. Suzuki adds the simplest possible storage condition:
Store the battery in a room above freezing.
Yamaha’s MT-07 gives a window at both ends instead:
Do not store the battery in an excessively cold or warm place…
with the figures spelled out in the same sentence. Beyond that, a dead battery in spring is its own subject, and this blog already has it: what actually drains it over the winter, how to tell a flat battery from a finished one, and how to bring it back is in what to do when the battery is dead after winter. If it goes flat while you are riding rather than while it sits, that is a different fault entirely, and it is covered in how to test a stator.
Tyres, and the two Suzuki manuals that disagree with each other
Here the documents contradict each other, and the contradiction is instructive because it happens inside one brand, two years apart.
Suzuki SV650, 2021, tyre section in its entirety:
Inflate tires to the normal pressure.
That is the whole instruction. Suzuki V-Strom 800DE, 2023:
Adjust tire pressure to the recommended pressure, and raise so that the front and rear wheels are off the ground.
…with a note telling you to ask the dealer how to do the lifting. Both Yamaha books say the same as the newer Suzuki, with the monthly quarter-turn as the fallback for anyone without stands.
If you want the pressures themselves, and the reason the number on the swingarm sticker beats the number moulded on the tyre, that is in the guide to motorcycle tyres. And if you find a nail in one in March, what the tyre makers’ own manuals say about repairs is worth reading before you reach for a plug kit.
The exhaust, the airbox, and the oil that gets changed twice
Three jobs that the internet checklists mostly skip, and that all four manuals take seriously.
Plug the exhaust. Yamaha, both books:
Cover the muffler outlet with a plastic bag to prevent moisture from entering it.
Suzuki closes two openings instead of one:
Cover the air cleaner intake and the muffler outlet with oily rags…
Oil the cylinder walls. Same gesture in three of the four books, different doses: Yamaha says “Pour a teaspoonful of engine oil into each spark plug bore”, Suzuki’s SV650 says “Pour one tablespoon of motor oil into each spark plug hole”. Roughly five millilitres against fifteen — I report both because both are printed, not because I have a preference. The XSR900 GP prefers a proper fogging oil and treats the spark-plug method as the fallback, and the newest book of the four, the V-Strom 800DE, drops the do-it-yourself version entirely:
For the inside engine protection method, consult with your dealer.
Change the oil — and then change it again. Suzuki asks for fresh oil before storage:
Drain the engine oil thoroughly and refill the crankcase with fresh engine oil…
and then, in the return-to-service procedure in the same chapter:
Drain all the engine oil. Install a new oil filter and fill the engine with fresh oil…
Two oil changes for one winter. Neither Yamaha manual asks for an oil change in the storage procedure at all. This is the widest gap between the two brands in the whole comparison, and if you are wondering which side to take, the honest answer is that the service schedule in your own book wins — the logic of how those intervals are built is in what the maintenance schedules actually say.
Where you put it matters more than what you cover it with
Only Yamaha bothers to say where a motorcycle should not sleep, and the list is oddly specific:
To prevent corrosion, avoid damp cellars, stables (because of the presence of ammonia) and areas where strong chemicals are stored.
Stables, because of ammonia. That is a detail no listicle would invent. The same notice warns against covering a bike that is still wet, or shutting it in a room without ventilation — both of which trap moisture against the metal rather than keeping it out.
Suzuki, for its part, cares about one thing: that the bike will not fall over. Side stand on firm, flat ground; centre stand if there is one.
Which brings up washing. Every one of these procedures begins with cleaning the bike, and every one of them insists it must be dry before the cover goes on. Road salt and grime left on over five months is corrosion with a head start; how to wash a motorcycle without ruining anything covers the parts you should not point a pressure washer at. The chain deserves the same treatment before it sits: clean, dry, lubricated, as in the chain maintenance comparison.
Coming back out in spring
Everything above is the entry. The exit is a different checklist, and it is already written: preparing a motorcycle for spring after storage covers what to check before the first ride, the pre-ride checks are the five minutes that matter most on that first morning, and the first ride of the season is about the rider, who has also been in storage. If you want the whole year in one view rather than one season, there is a year-round maintenance calendar, and the hands-on jobs are collected in ten operations worth learning.
The short version
- Sixty days is the only threshold any of these manuals commits to. Weeks between rides is the threshold for the fuel alone.
- Fill the tank, do not drain it, and add stabiliser at the dose printed on the bottle. Then run the engine once — five minutes — so treated fuel reaches the injectors.
- The last tank of the season is bought outside the summer volatility period, which at the pump ends on 15 September.
- 10 percent ethanol is the ceiling in the manual (warranty) and in federal regulation (which names every motorcycle, any year).
- Do not start it monthly. Charge the battery monthly, turn the wheels monthly, leave the ignition alone.
- Plug the exhaust, oil the cylinders if your book says so, and follow your own manual on the oil change.
- Dry, ventilated, above freezing, not a stable.
What RideLog does here, and what it does not
Let me be exact, because this is a subject where an app can easily pretend to do more than it does.
RideLog does not measure your fuel. It cannot see the ethanol content of what went into the tank, it does not know whether you added stabiliser, and it does not watch the battery. None of that is in the app and none of it is coming.
What it has is the thing all the numbers above depend on: dates. Trips are detected automatically, so the date of the last ride is recorded without you remembering to record it — which is exactly the “60 days or more” and “weeks at a time between uses” that the manuals hang their advice on. The refuelling log stores each fill-up with its date and odometer reading, so in March you can see when that last tank went in rather than guessing. Maintenance reminders are per vehicle, so the spring check belongs to the bike that slept and not to the one that kept running. And because it is multi-vehicle, a bike laid up for the winter and a scooter still commuting are two separate histories, not one blurred average. Everything stays on the phone — no account, no cloud, no server — and exports to PDF or CSV if you ever need to hand a service history to somebody.
Download RideLog for free if that sounds useful. If what you actually want is to know how much fuel the bike drinks rather than how old it is, that is a different question and it has its own guide: optimising fuel consumption.
Frequently asked questions
Should I drain the fuel tank before winter?
Not according to any of the four owner’s manuals in this comparison. All four say to fill it. Yamaha gives the reason: a full tank prevents “the fuel tank from rusting”, and the stabiliser handles the fuel itself. The only draining instruction anywhere in the four books concerns a carburettor float chamber, and even there the fuel goes back into the tank.
How long can a motorcycle sit before it needs winterizing?
The only manual that commits to a number says sixty days: “Before storing the vehicle long term (60 days or more)”. The same manual sets a shorter trigger for the fuel alone — a stabiliser at every fill-up if the bike routinely sits for weeks between rides.
Is it bad to start my motorcycle once a month during storage?
Suzuki says so in writing, and names the exact reason people do it: leaving the engine running without travelling, in order to charge the battery, “may cause the engine to overheat”. The monthly jobs the manuals do ask for are recharging the battery and turning the wheels — not starting the engine.
Can I put E15 in a motorcycle?
No. 40 CFR 1090.230 prohibits gasoline above 10 percent ethanol in “any highway or off-highway motorcycle”, with no model-year exception, and the 2011 rulemaking extended that obligation to everyone involved in fuelling, consumers included. Every manual in this comparison independently caps ethanol at 10 percent.
Why does the E15 pump label not mention motorcycles?
Because a decision was taken not to list products individually. Icons of a boat, motorcycle, chainsaw, lawnmower and snowmobile were proposed during the rulemaking and rejected, on the reasoning that a partial list “would run the risk of implying that types of equipment not included on the list are suitable for E15 use”. Boats were named anyway, on the grounds that boat owners might not think of a boat as a vehicle. Motorcycles fall under “other vehicles”.
Does the fuel really change between summer and winter?
The legal ceiling on volatility does. At the pump the summer season runs from 1 June to 15 September, and the 9.0 psi maximum applies only inside it. Outside that window, gasoline is blended for cold starting rather than for low evaporation. No regulation gives gasoline a shelf life, so treat any number you read about that as an estimate, not a rule.
—
Winterizing is thirty minutes of work on a day you would rather be riding. The documents make it simpler than the internet does: fill the tank, treat it, run it once, plug the holes, take the battery inside, get the wheels off the ground, put it somewhere dry — and then leave it alone until spring. Download RideLog and the two dates that matter, the last ride and the last fill-up, will be waiting for you in March without you having written anything down.
