JeffreyD

What is the best battery and watts for long distance e-bicycling? I saw Juiced Bikes offered a 1000-watt e-bike but when I asked their technical rep. He said it would get me more torque and speed but only an estimated 60-70 miles on the lowest setting on a level road. My Trek CrossRip 500-watt Bosch battery gets me about the same distance. I’m more interested in distance than speed.

August West

You will probably get more responses posting this in the "Electric Bikes" forum here.

Seattle Forrest

Dean V

It comes down to the batteries W/hr rating.
The other numbers don't matter unless a manufacturer has a more efficient motor or speed controller.

shelbyfv

I doubt any brand will give you more than 60-70 miles, but again, wrong forum. Ask a mod to move it for you. A Honda Super Cub will get you about 100 mpg

fried bake

Adding a range extender (second battery designed to look like a bottle in the down tube bottle cage) to most ebikemotion equipped bikes will take you over 100 miles with normal usage. Orbea, Cannondale, Willier, Colnago, Bianchi and Pinarello all offer ebikemotion road bikes. The range extender is now available online from several sellers.

atwl77

I've occasionally joked with my friends about having a dynamo hub charge a motor... but there's the issue with physics and all that. But still... if the motor's only working uphills, partially working on flats and not working downhills, there's surely *some* benefit, no? Only question then is how much, and whether that's significant or not.

Bah Humbug

It would have to work on the same principle as a hybrid car, storing energy while braking or coasting downhill and spending it on acceleration and climbing. Whether that can be done with low enough weight to be a benefit I don't know. Or care, really.

Seattle Forrest

I would love to see power data from a whole bunch of ebikes. Is the motor really only working going up hills? How much power do the riders contribute, when they don't have to? I'm sure there are different types of ebike riders, and the data will be all over the place. But I'd be curious to see.

Elvo

It depends. Some motors are tuneable to provide zero to 50,000 watts of assist

big john

That's about 67 horsepower, surely would rip a bicycle to pieces.

big john

Regenerative braking. It would add a great deal of weight and mass to a bike, not to mention complexity and cost. Those components would have to be engineered from scratch and would probably work better with a shaft drive because of the reverse torque, ( the braking wouldn't work with a derailleur). Probably not enough benefit unless you are doing long descents and then the rear wheel only braking could get iffy with low traction conditions.
Much simpler to just carry an extra battery.

I guess you could put a charging hub on the front wheel and switch it on when descending. I don't know how big it would have to be to be effective.

MoAlpha

A few points:

Batteries are rated in Amp hrs (Ah), meaning the number of Amps the battery will deliver over a given time period before discharging completely. However, rechargeable batteries are generally destroyed by doing this, so the number cannot be used to predict mileage without knowing a lot more about the system. Battery-driven systems generally shut down (and batteries are damaged) below a critical battery voltage, not after a set number of Amps are drawn, and the relationship between Amps pumped out and battery voltage is complex (at least to a lay person like me) and nonlinear. In general, however, a 100 Ah battery will run your gizmo about twice as long as a 50 Ah battery, between charges.

Watts of electrical output for the battery is just the Amp draw of the motor (at a given output) times the voltage of the system, which is essentially constant. However, that number is meaningless in terms of bike power or range without knowing the efficiency of the motor over its speed range.

big john

The bike doesn't know if you're going uphill, the torque sensor only knows how much force you put on the pedals.

Ogsarg

The energy used to spin the dynamo hub will be greater than what the hub puts back into the battery. Where that energy comes from (motor, rider, gravity) will change based on going uphill or downhill, headwind or tailwind, etc, but the bottom line is that you can't convert one form of energy into another without losing some.

big john

No free lunch?

noodle soup

NSFW

Sy Reene

Can you move the bike without turning on the motor at all. Ie. on flat roads? Only flick the switch when you need help from a motor getting up the hill?