Originally Posted by
Tourist in MSN
Given the bad luck you had with your Luxos U chargers, you might want to hook up the Sinewave and make sure it puts power into your powerbank ok well before your tour starts,
If the battery pack in the Luxos U is still there, that might put a small drain on your hub even when the light is turned off. That might be something to check before your tour starts. It is my understanding that the battery pack supplies the standlight on the light, thus I assume it is still part of your light.
I will be checking the Sinewave before hand. i have already set it up to be wired into my hub and have verified that a charge is detected while riding, but I haven't actually charged anything. The charge was too inconsistent for my phone, which was also the case for the Luxos U. The on-and-off of the phone meant that it still lost power over the course of a ride, although that's on my stop-and-go, urban commute. Very possibly it would work better on an actual tour where I didn't have to stop for traffic signals every few minutes. Generally, though, I have worked around this by having it charge a battery that I then used to charge the phone when the day's riding was done.
The Luxos U is off the bike for the time being. I have switched to a Cyo T, which has the advantage of fairly straightforward switch, so I can turn it off and not divert any energy from the Sinewave. When I'm not charging anything, I just leave it on in the daytime running light mode. I don't really notice any change in the friction of the hub when the light is off vs. on. At least not enough to ever bother turning the light off.
The Luxos U may have continued to draw a little on the hub to replenish its cache battery. I don't know, but, like the Cyo, I usually left it on, so it didn't really matter. What surprised me is that the cache battery seemed to continue to supply a small amount of power to the lights for days at a time, even when not connected to the hub, and it also surprised me that the light didn't fully turn off when it passed its "standlight" time, although I think that was more damage to the light, because I think when the light was new, it did not have quality of continuing to emit a tiny bit of light for days on end when not in use.