Originally Posted by
rifraf
Thank you for the link.
I found it very interesting and informative.
Like yourself, having been more than satisfied with my hardware, over a decade now, I’d not kept up with the plethora of articles about the newcomers.
What I take from the article is that for my style of riding and touring, there doesn’t appear any significant advantages to warrant putting my hand in my pocket seeking an large upgrade currently.
I do spend a small amount of time keeping an eye out for new and better stuff. The Cycle2Charge looked good to me, but not as long as my Sinewave continues to work. If the Sinewave dies, at this time the Cycle2Charge is probably what I would buy to replace it. I checked their price about a year or two ago, at that time the price was competative.
On batteries, I prefer a powerbank that I can use with any power source as my pass through cache battery, not one that is only useable with the charger. And the non-cycle variety appear to have a better price per watt-hour of capacity.
My last tour, I discovered the hard way that I had a high resistance wire in my wire collection, and I was not getting as much charge into my powerbank as I should have gotten. I was able to plug my powerbank into an outlet in a campground laundry room to charge it up again. Discarded the bad cable and finished my tour with a nearly fully charged powerbank. If my battery was only charged by the dynohub without being able to charge it from an outlet, that would have been a bit more frustrating.
On that tour, I learned a number of other things, for example if I was using my phone to get a weather forecast in the morning when it was about 40 degrees F (~~ 5 degrees C), my battery would deplete rapidly, but if I warmed up my phone and battery in my sleeping bag first, I consumed a lot less battery power. I did not buy a local sim card for that country, so my phone was only useable on wifi for internet connection, that helped force some of my frugality with my power supply.