Originally Posted by
brothmirepoix
What do I have to know to be an e-bike owner? Is maintenance expensive? Do people worry about it getting stolen more than a normal bike? Can you toggle the e-assist on and off?
I live in similar terrain and have been riding DIY ebikes for the past year. From my experience, I’d recommend at least a 1000W system in order to maintain a minimum of ~14mph up the steepest hills and a cruising speed of 20mph up moderate ones. Because if you are commuting or even just running errands, speed counts! Dunno whether their are any OEMs like this, as 750W is the legal limit for ebikes here in the US. Don’t worry about that personally because I’ve got my system limited to 20mph and always pedal furiously along with the assist and always obey traffic laws, so LE has no reason ever to stop me and would probably never even realize my bike’s electric.
My first conversion
“Blutus” was a dual 500W 48/52V 26” Bafang hub drive (throttle only, no PAS) with two separate 52V 20Ah Luna DireWolf battery packs, which worked great. But unfortunately Bafang’s wheels are not assembled with the most supple spokes and after only around 1000 miles broke one in the rear, for which the original vendor could not spec a replacement. Had to purchase a special spoke ruler to determine the correct length, am still looking around for superior quality units with which to rebuild both wheels.
Meantime, built a second ecumbent
“Redundo” with both a 20” 500W Bafang front hub drive and a TSDZ2 mid drive to power the 26” Halo Combat rear wheel, reusing the same two battery packs from Blutus. When the TSDZ2 works the system is superb, but unfortunately the TongShen with Open Source Firmware I received is kind of a lemon and not reliable up the steepest hills. So purchased a 1000W Bafang BBSHD with which to replace it, in case I can’t get the TSDZ2 performing correctly with the standard, non-flashed display from Ali Express that’s currently on its way to me.
Internal replacement gearsets for either a Bafang hub or mid drive are readily available pretty cheap, but you should get many thousands of miles out of the conversion kits before that should be a concern.
I’m rural and don’t worry too much about anyone making off with my enormous[ly heavy] ecumbents but understand that would be a consideration in more urban environs. There are numerous threads here about locking up ebikes which offer way better advice than I could provide.
And yes, you can control the level of assist on any ebike. Bafang offers ten levels, from 0-9, and from an Intelligent Display such as the 860C or newer P860C you can modify that to 0-5 or 0-3, IIRC.
Hope this helps.