What You MUST Know About Ebike Batteries Before Buying an Electric Bike
Welcome to part three of my seven part series of Robert’s guide to buying an electric bike manufacturers haven’t yet come to a consensus as to where to place a battery on their electric bikes some place it conspicuously on top of of the rear rack this option makes
The battery easy to remove unless it’s a Pedigo and leads the down tube and the seat tube free for bottle holders or storage bags some place the battery at the back of the seat this is pretty uncommon and this position can only accommodate a very small battery others
Decide to place it either in front or at the back of the seat post as in these photos this places the weight lower and closer to the center of the bike some attach it to the down tube like we see here and some cleverly hide it inside a
Customade frame like the seat post position these last ones put the weight of the battery in the middle of the bike providing the rider with better balance and maneuverability there is one thing to watch out for if you need to charge your bike at the office or if you live on a
Third floor apartment without an elevator is the battery removable most batteries are but some ebikes can only be recharged by parking the bike close to an electrical outlet will there ever be a consensus as to where to place an electric bike battery when the first ebikes were built
People took a regular steel frame bicycle and added components to make it into an electric bike there are still ebikes being built this way because steel has many strong points that some cyclists find preferable I’ll talk about bicycle frames in section seven of this series so the black battery was a
Separate item that had to be placed somewhere on the bike either on the rear Rack or on one of the down tubes after switching to aluminum as a building material for the frames easy molding techniques permitted shaping the frame to allow a space inside the down tube to conceal the battery since I
Began riding ebikes in 2015 I found that every year an increasing number of Manufacturers are adopting this elegant solution I see this as a natural evolutionary step in the development of the electric bike and it’s the way of the future we know that cars get their energy from a liquid fuel
In a tank the bigger the tank the further the car can go but energy for a eike is in the form of electrical power stored in a battery but likewise the bigger the battery battery the further the bike can go instead of being measured in liters or gallons the energy
Of a knee bike is measured in wat hours a single wat hour is the small amount of electricity used by device that uses one watt of power and that’s made to run for a period of 1 hour for example a 100 watt light bulb left on for 1 hour would
Use 100 wat hours there are big differences in the size of battery depending on the ebike model they can range anywhere from 180 wat hours to more than a th000 wat hours the average I would say is about 600 wat hours instead of specifying the capacity of the battery in wat hours some
Manufacturers will provide only the voltage and amperage and you have to figure out the capacity by yourself fortunately it’s not complicated ated let’s take the example of a 48v 10.5 amp battery you just need to multiply those two numbers to get the wat hours in this case 48 *
10.5 gives you 504 Watt hours you might be wondering how long it takes to charge an ebik battery the majority of ebikes come with either a 2 Amp or 3 amp charger that will charge the battery within 4 to 8 hours depending on the size of the battery I
Don’t know why but there’s no such thing as fast charging ebikes that’s something you have to keep in mind if you’re riding long distances in a day as a general rule manufacturers offer only one size of battery per model of bike and there’s no way of asking for
A larger one consequently you might have to buy a second one to carry with you on a long ride and option that’s available on many ebike models is a dual battery Arrangement like the Juiced bike lithium batteries can be recharged from 500 to 2,000 times during their lifetime to prevent premature aging of
The battery it’s best to avoid draining it completely before putting it back on the charger the simplest way to maintain your lithium battery is to put it on the charger at the end of each ride if your ride was only 5 or 10 K km long and you
Know that you won’t be going on a long ride next time it’s not worth taking the trouble to top it up and it won’t do your battery any good nor harm as long as you don’t ever store your battery empty if you want to learn more about
How to maintain your battery you can watch a video by Area 13 ebikes Linked In the description lithium batteries don’t expire all of a sudden they lose 5 to 10% of their capacity per year year even if they’re not being used if your battery was bigger than you needed the
First year by the third or fourth year it might be just the correct size by the time they’re 5 to 10 years old batteries might have lost so much capacity as to render them useless the moral of the story is that it’s wise to buy a battery a bit larger
Than what you estimate you need I haven’t heard of anybody complaining about having a battery that’s too l large maybe you’re wondering how heavy is an ebike battery although lithium batteries are much lighter than the old lead acid batteries their weight isn’t negligible when you have to carry it
Around you can count on the fact that the weight is directly proportional to its power for example the 672 W rad battery at the left weighs 7.7 lb and the 950w hour reent engine battery at the right weighs 11.4 lb just to put that in perspective with regards to how far a
Lithium battery can take you it takes on average 10 wat hours to cover 1 kilometer or 16 wat hours per mile so a 500w battery can take the average ebik 50 kilm or 30 miles riding at 26 to 29 km an hour with the rider providing 50%
% of the effort it can be more or less depending on how much exercise you want to do how fast you want to go and other conditions don’t pay any attention to the claims that manufacturers make about the upper limit of the range of their ebikes on account of the multitude of
Factors that affect range these figures are meaningless actually if you’re Keen to know what are the 17 factors that affect range you can watch my video what is the range of an electric bike linked at the end of this video and if you want to dig
Into it and find an easy to understand explanation of a what watch my video how much energy does an electric bike really use linked at the end of this video what about the cost you might have heard that an electric bike’s most expensive component is its battery that
Is correct except for the very high-end ebikes the best way to calculate the true Purchase cost of a battery is to calculate the cost per wat hour for example in 2023 the Bosch power pack 500 battery cost $1,080 in Canadian currency this comes to $2.15 per wat hour but other batteries
Can be much more economical the 20 amp hour battery for the Havoc X2 step which is 996 60 W hours cost only 68 cents per W hour there might be a difference in the quality of those two batteries but I have no way of knowing you can find
Cheap Chinese made batteries on eBay for even less although I wouldn’t count on them to be durable or safe this brings me to the following point the security of your valuable battery battery locks and switches the lock operated by a key secures the battery to the bike’s frame to deter
Theft the switch turns the power off when the battery isn’t being used batteries that have a simple lock and onoff switch which are found on entrylevel ebikes are subject to tampering which means that anybody could hop onto your bike and ride away with the aid of the motor manufacturers have
Come up with two different strategies to overcome this the lowtech method is to equip the battery with a three position lock off lock and power when you turn the key from the off position the first click locks the battery onto the frame at that point there’s no power to the system so
Nobody can take your bike and use the motor for a quick getaway to turn the power on it takes a second click on most ebikes once the battery is powered you need to turn the system on with a button on the selector switch or on the display the high-end solution to prevent
Unauthorized use of the bike is to require a password to be entered into the display to power the bike with some high-end bikes you can power them on through an app on your phone but I’ll tell you oldfashioned me prefers the physical key of course in addition to a
Tamperproof powering system you want to lock your bike to a bicycle rack or some kind of strong structure a feature found on all batteries except some cheap Imports is a charge level indicator it consists of a button and three or four LEDs that light up I find
This useful when I’ve had my batteries in the house for a while and I want to verify that they’re all fully recharged finally you might have heard horror stories about ebike batteries catching on fire and burning down buildings in New York City and else W for more information watch my video your
Electric bike May soon be illegal Linked In the description the long and the short of it is that if you buy an ebike from a reputable bicycle shop you should be getting a good quality battery the gold standard for bicycle battery safety is to make sure it has underwriter’s laboratory
Certification which all ebike manufacturers are going to be required to obtain there are actions you can take to reduce the chances of a fire if you’re interested you might like to watch my follow-up video tips for preventing ebike battery fires also linked in the description that’s all for part three of
Robert’s guide for electric bikes join me for part four which will cover the gearing system of electric bikes we’ll see how geared Motors and direct drive Motors differ with regards to the use of gears and why this could matter a great deal for you we will also look at some
Of the brilliant alternatives to the dreaded derailer and we’ll talk about the different Drive systems for electric bicycles see you soon if you like my channel you can help support it by giving this video a like or writing a comment or sharing with others and if you haven’t already done
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Bro.com thank you for watching and remember never quit cycling
This video is about e-bike batteries. It will be about the power of the battery, the best place for the battery on the bike, the electricity storage capacity, the weight, the charging, the longevity, the power of the bike, the power of the battery, the power of the bike, the power storage capacity, the power storage capacity, the power storage capacity, the power of autonomy, battery anti-theft systems, cost and finally, fire safety
