How many miles on your bike? Still using it?
I've got little under 550 miles on my bike, and battery capacity has decreased below 75%, quickly dropping to 50% when charging it with the stock a5AMP charger.
I bought a 3AMP charger, which takes longer to charge, but the battery holds charge better with that charger.
I think I have driven it a while, but am well under 10% of 700 recharge cycles, and it's already lost so much charge.
I'll be looking into the option to send it back to the company, and get the battery measured.
I heard I got 1 year of warranty on the battery. If they could recondition it, or give me a new one, it'll give me another 6-9 months to before I'm back in this same situation again.
Any ideas how expensive it will be to ship a battery?
Pack life is certainly the make-or-break part of the economics of using one of these scoots.
My Lead-acid XB600 is doing well on its second battery pack; I got about 2 1/2 years on the first one - perhaps 500 recharges. I have, however, used a parallel charging setup, with the total amps for all four batteries at 2.5A.
IMHO, a conventional serial-charging 48V setup is guaranteed to suffer premature failure due to inadequate battery balancing. The factory method of balancing the pack it to overcharge it, which just makes the next imbalance more likely.
I would only use a Lion pack with cell-level battery management at the Prius level of sophistication. Has anyone else seen another way to ensure pack life?
Mark
When I bought my first ebike kit it came with lead acid batteries and a 5A charger. I was supposed to get 500 cycles out of it but in reality I got 16 cycles before the lead acid battery had lost about 70% charge capacity. Then I went and bought a PING lithium battery and now, 4 years later is still around 95% capacity and nearly 9000km on the electric push bike with no problems at all.
There is no secret why batteries last so long in hybrids - electronics turns them off at 50% - 70% State of Discharge.
Anyway I assume you don't ask only about escooters in the title of your hread.
So my Tidal FORCE ebicycle JUST CROSSED 22,500 km of millage through heat, winter subzero temperatures, pouring rains many times,of course NOT on original battery.
I ride at MINIMUM 330 days in a year in climate of central Canada.
TF is a legend for a reason.
I'm still running the original stock batteries 5.5 years and 25,000 km later on my XB-600 e-bike. The solution for me was the 60v mod. I added another 12v battery (charged separately) in series to my stock 48v 4-pack. Now that my stock batteries hold ~10V each, I'd like to add yet another new battery in series......which brings me to my next question. What is the cheapest way to maintain a max. 60V output across the circuit once I add the next battery (so I don't fry my controller, dc-dc converter, or my ego)? Cheers.
IMHO, a conventional serial-charging 48V setup is guaranteed to suffer premature failure due to inadequate battery balancing. The factory method of balancing the pack it to overcharge it, which just makes the next imbalance more likely.
I've never had any trouble with that, from my 48 volt lepton, through my 60 volt X-Treme XM-3000 (up for sale - needs controller) to my ZEV 5000LA. I've always done a 'pre-charge' before riding; maybe this is the secret to balancing a series lead-based pack...
Sorry, double-posted.
I'm glad you were lucky. I would still advise new EV'ers to do everything they can to fill each battery equally, and to avoid overcharging.
Equalizing charges by overcharging is a perfectly valid strategy with floodies: excess charge decomposes the water in the electrolyte which can easily be replaced, but AGM lead acid cells cannot be refilled.
MF70
That's all true, but in my book experience trumps theory, and I don't think you can call it "lucky" that I've gotten very good results with three out of three vehicles, using pre-charging to equalize. It's also worth noting that I am *not* a lucky man! Read my experiences here with my ZEV 5000LA if you don't believe me. It might work less well with vehicles being used daily, because of higher electrolyte evaporation, but for the typical EV scooter rider I think it's worth trying.
Hey all.
My 750w e-bike now has 9,890km. The electric gear is now on it's second bike frame, 4th rear tire and 2nd chain, and second front forks and uncounted brake pads. I ditched the 36v lead batteries for a 36v 30Ah PING lithium pack back on 7 December 2009. I recently did a 58km ride a few weeks ago and the BMS shut down the bike after 29.85Ah so my battery pack is still at 99.5% capacity after 3.5 years and 9890km!
My 8000w eRider electric scooter now has over 11,000km and battery is still around 100.5% capacity.
My Electric Nissan LEAF now has 13,000km and still at 101.92% capacity.
Moral of the story, ditch lead and get a good lithium battery with a BMS.
I'm loving lithium :)
I think that to determine the 'moral of the story' we'd need to know how top-shelve lead packs fare against medium and top-shelf lithium packs. If you want something to compare the cheap SLA batteries most mopeds and E-bikes come with to something, it should be the cheap lithium packs on entry-level lithium E-bikes, not the wonderful but expensive Ping packs (I am now using one as well, on my EZIP - love it.) and Nissan's flawed but still highly-engineered and expensive LiMn pack in the Leaf (I have one of those now, too, and also love it.) I still maintain that if you want to actually be able to afford a scooter, lead-silicone batteries provide a better cost/benefit ratio and better reliability than the typical lithium pack. For cars SLA or SLS batteries are just too heavy and not energy dense enough for anything but a NEV, but for two-wheelers they can still be a cost effective option that can also be more reliable.
My 4000li currently has 29,307 km (18211 miles) and I am on my second set of 40h cells which were largerly replaced under warranty, so I am effectively still operating under my original purchase prices of $1900 USD. The GBS cells I have in it appear to have excellent capacity, better than the thundersky, and my best range currently is 48 miles. Couldn't be happier with this bike.
My 4000li currently has 29,307 km (18211 miles) and I am on my second set of 40h cells which were largerly replaced under warranty, so I am effectively still operating under my original purchase prices of $1900 USD. The GBS cells I have in it appear to have excellent capacity, better than the thundersky, and my best range currently is 48 miles. Couldn't be happier with this bike.
