{"id":246,"date":"2014-01-28T21:55:47","date_gmt":"2014-01-28T21:55:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/192.168.3.4\/?p=246"},"modified":"2018-01-09T06:48:21","modified_gmt":"2018-01-09T14:48:21","slug":"boost-converters-costs-in-time-and-energy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cloudacm.com\/?p=246","title":{"rendered":"eBikeology Part 1- A personal account on electric bikes"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been operating electric bikes since 2008 after seeing Russ William’s demo his Crystalyte<\/a>.\u00a0 I always enjoyed biking, but hadn’t been interested in regular use or long rides.\u00a0 The idea of the bike having an electric assist really sparked my interest.\u00a0 I started to do my homework.<\/p>\n

Since I didn’t have any real starting point, I just looked for resellers of kits.\u00a0 The best bang for the buck I found was with an outfit based out of Kansas called Electric Rider<\/a>.\u00a0 They have since changed locations and there website is more sophisticated than when I first found them.\u00a0 I shelled out the cash for the 408 Crystalyte RoadRunner and a few days later it arrived.\u00a0 It was a 36V 25A system and the only thing left was put it together.<\/p>\n

I spent half a day going through removing parts from my silver Mongoose and installing the kit.\u00a0 The 408 is a heavy hub motor.\u00a0 Once I had it all installed, I went to work on hooking up my power tool battery packs.\u00a0 I got this inspiration from Russ’s demo.\u00a0 Everything was done and I powered it up.\u00a0\u00a0 Spinning!<\/p>\n

It was a pleasant summer afternoon in 2008 and I took a ride down to the local store.\u00a0 It ran sweet, cruising at 21mph.\u00a0 I started to head home and was tailing a car when all off a sudden the dreaded LVCO.\u00a0 I would soon be schooled in the ways of Low Voltage Cut Off.\u00a0 It’s a buzz kill.\u00a0 I had to huff it back to the house with conventional power.<\/p>\n

It became clear that the power tool batteries weren’t going to cut it.\u00a0 I had to source something that would.\u00a0 Luckily, I found a reseller that had custom packs that were intended for ebikes.\u00a0 Batteryspace<\/a> had a 10ah Li-Poly pack that was 5 times the rating of the power tool batteries.\u00a0 The cost was hard to swallow and I had some reservations about the potential fire hazard that Li-Poly’s pose<\/a>.\u00a0 Again, it arrived a few days later with a smart charger and I was back in business.<\/p>\n

This time to avoid the surprise of LVCO, I also bought a Watt’s Up watt meter that gave me a tally of my usage.\u00a0 I didn’t want to get a rude reminder at the bottom of the hill.<\/p>\n

I took it out and the same performance speed was there.\u00a0 I was able to get up to 20 miles before I felt I needed to recharge.\u00a0 This was awesome!\u00a0 Soon, I was using it for my day to day commute and other rides around town.\u00a0 I recall one time riding it in the snow that winter, I must have spilled it a dozen times.\u00a0 The only thing not covered with snow was the hub motor.<\/p>\n

Then came the need for speed.\u00a0 I was interested in the inner workings, I was constantly looking at what others were doing and trying out.\u00a0 I stumbled on to a demo of a modified motor<\/a> that basically was a rewire.\u00a0 The standard wiring for the motors is a common point for all phases with each lead for each phase, this is referred to as a WYE.\u00a0 The demo from Doctorbass was wired with all phases in a loop, called DELTA.<\/p>\n

\"408Rewire\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

By this time it was late spring 2009 and the hack had to happen.\u00a0 I had already bent 2 rims and that needed to be replaced again anyway.\u00a0 I opened up my 408 and started rewiring.\u00a0 Once it was done, I did a bench test.\u00a0 It ran like crap.\u00a0 Turns out that I had to switch one of the phase pairs and that did it.\u00a0 It was noticeably faster.\u00a0 I decided to take it our for a spin.<\/p>\n

I was able to get the speed up to 27mph.\u00a0 Be reminded that this was run from a 36V 25A controller.\u00a0 I had anticipated going over 30mph in part to my assumption that the 1.7 x rule would apply.\u00a0 It didn’t because the energy was being used to push air out of the way.\u00a0 Another thing that I noticed was my phase wires were getting hot.\u00a0 One afternoon ride, I noticed smoke from my controller box.\u00a0 Not cool!<\/p>\n

So I decided to slow the mustang down and go back to the drawing board.\u00a0 It was winter 2009, I started to notice a drop in my distance with each charge.\u00a0 It started to really degrade and I knew I had to replace the pack when it got down to 14 miles per charge.\u00a0 This is when I found LiFePO4 cells that were safe, but had some extra weight and size.\u00a0 Also, my silver Mongoose gave up the ghost that summer and I had everything now on my new Schwinn mountain bike.<\/p>\n

I ordered the 10Ah Headway cells from a local reseller in Lacey, WA called EV Components in the spring of 2010.\u00a0 I think I was the last person on the planet to get there order fulfilled from EV Components<\/a>, they soon went out of business.\u00a0 The BMS board, hookup hardware, and smart charger were ordered from Batteryspace.\u00a0 A few days later, it arrived.\u00a0 I spent an evening putting it together and charged up the pack.\u00a0 The pack was huge compared to the Li-Poly and it was twice as heavy.\u00a0 I had already replaced my seat post rack with a Tubus <\/a>rack, this was solid and I still use it today.\u00a0 I decided on using a Pelican <\/a>case for all the electronics.\u00a0 I sized it perfect and everything fit just right.<\/p>\n

\"NewSchwinnBike\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"NewCase\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Once everything was in place and up and running, I noticed a real improvement.\u00a0 First off, my range between charges had jumped to 35 miles!\u00a0 Next, the cells last 5 times as long as the Li-Poly’s.\u00a0 So instead of 10 months of service, I was looking at 50!\u00a0 This was great and offset the cost, size, and weight factors.<\/p>\n

But the weight eventually became a factor.\u00a0 I ended up braking so may spokes and replaced 2 more rims before I decided that the motor and battery weren’t going to work.\u00a0 This is when I completely revamped my setup and changed direction…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been operating electric bikes since 2008 after seeing Russ William’s demo his Crystalyte.\u00a0 I always enjoyed biking, but hadn’t been interested in regular use or long rides.\u00a0 The idea of the bike having an electric assist really sparked my interest.\u00a0 I started to do my homework. Since I didn’t have any real starting point, I just looked for resellers of kits.\u00a0 The best bang for the buck I found was with an outfit based out of Kansas called Electric…<\/p>\n

Read More Read More<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bike-rides","category-rd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cloudacm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cloudacm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cloudacm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cloudacm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cloudacm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=246"}],"version-history":[{"count":27,"href":"https:\/\/www.cloudacm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":590,"href":"https:\/\/www.cloudacm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246\/revisions\/590"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cloudacm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cloudacm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cloudacm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}