Hi all,
Not sure how many of eGo owners are existing anymore but I anyway give it shot.
I owe eGo Helio, European model. Now recently I have 2 painful problems:
1. the power of the bike reduced somehow suddenly.
Everything worked before my holidays. 4 weeks later I am not having anymore the power out of it the way I had earlier.
Facts:
-uphill bike is loosing power quickly. On hills I had speed 33kmph now I have 26-28kmph. Some short bad hills I can't even drive up anymore. Have to push it.
-belt starts skipping when rpm's drop substantially (uphills). Tightening it didn't help. Probably I am having a bad belt now after all those skippings but the belt was fine before the power problems appeared
-breaking power reduced at least 50%. Earlier I had 1.5-2% of regenerated power but now I have 0.4-0.7% (I have installed measurement device long time ago and I am having quite decent data out of it. Earlier, if the belt would not be tight enough the belt would start skipping when breaking suddenly but now even for the experiment purpose when I substantially loosen the belt I don't get any skipping which is not weird considering the breaking power is very much low. I am using heavilly hand brakes to stop even for speeds higher than 20kmph
2. The smaller problem is my disc brakes. I already replaced I don't know how many brake pads. They wear off in 2 weeks (I am driving it every day to work and back, 32km/day) and after that I need to tune it and tighten the screws so the pads can come closer to the disc. Changing different pad producer nor hardness level didn't help. They all wear off very quickly. The wear off speed is not affected with the problem 1. above, I had this problem even before I lost the motor mreaking power.
For the problem 1. I somehow suspect the brushes. 1 of them I already checked, the top one and that one is fine. I can notice difference of motor power when I put it and when I for a second pull it up to see if there is any difference. It is about half of the brush still available.
2 other ones I still need to check but the lowest one is not possible without motor removal which kind of scares me :))
Is there anyone with experience with troubleshooting considering power loss of the bike? Perhaps there is something else which might affect it I am not yet aware off. I just don't want to remove motor to find that the brush is fine, that would kill me :))
The problem with brakes I tried to cope with, replacing the braking system. Didn't manage to remove the disk itself as the screwes are so tightened and years of use made it impossible to remove them. I tried and got the hexagonal hole in them be a circular hole now so no removal without some special advanced manipulation. My idea was that perhaps the disc is too rough and is grating them faster than it should but manual inspection on the disk didn't show any difference between that one and another I have on my other bicycle. Perhaps the bike is just heavy with me and needs more of it.
Any experience with the brakes, do they really wear off so quickly? I somehow have better function with the rear rubber V-brakes one.
I hope somehow has the nerves to read this all through and help me as I am getting desperate and not sure that the bursh thing will bring me anywhere...and then I have no clue what to check anymore.
Babo
Just for info. I found the problem 1. and it was like I expected, the brushes.
Out of 4 brushes 3 I managed to check without removing the motor. They were all almost consumed to the bottom. I seems didn't have contact with 1 of those 3 at all.
The 4. brush is in the bottom of the motor and I managed to replace it yesterday after removing the motor fro the body.
As the brush was in the bottom the dust particles of the brush which get grinded away drop down as the gravitation pulls them. They built up around the brushes spring so after some time the brush got stuck in that dust and the spring was not enough to push it towards the motor. I had to pull the brush with pliers. Some cleaning of the brush hole and the new brush went into it without problems.
The performance is back completely, I am getting nice and stable max 37-38 kmh.
The problem 2 with brakes still remains and I still don't know what I will do but if I find any idea and solution I will write it here for any case, someone might find some use of it :)
Babo