Extend eBike touring range with batteries, fast chargers and technique even when wild camping

I'm going to talk a bit about how to get the best possible range out of your ebike when you're bike packing uh I've been using the bike packing term here to use to mean a situation where you intend to do quite a lot of wild camping uh so therefore your opportunities to recharge batteries are going to be quite limited it's not difficult at all if you're staying in a hotel every night obviously you just charge a battery every night that's easy but that's not the situation I'm talking about H so this is based on my own experience I've now been doing this for two years I've gone about 6,000 km 7,000 km around Ireland and Scotland um and I'm going to be bringing you through some of the upgrades you can make that will help extend your range and then towards the end I'm also going to talk about technique and how your Technique and have quite a sizable difference on how far you can actually go uh so let's start with my system one I'm using I have Rally Motors to E Bike it uses the Bosch system H so the specific so some of the the gear here are going to be specific to Bosch but they are probably equivalent with whatever system you have just need to check that out for yourself so when I bought this bike it had it came with a 400 hour battery uh and the first thing I did because I was buying for touring was I bought a 500 our battery which is here in practice I can safely get 80 km out of the 400 and I can get 100 out of the 500 that's the safe you know I can always get that distance basically uh I canot I talk about technique in a while and how I get further but that's an initial start Point um so I used that for cycling all around the Irish Coastline and then last summer I went to Scotland and I knew in Scotland and particularly the islands and Highlands northwest corner all that that I was doing they're actually charging opportunities would be even for further apart so I really splashed out and I bought a second 500 WT battery didn't bring all three batteries with me that's too much waste 2 and 1/2 kilos each uh I just brought the two 500s H so that meant I could be very sure of a range of 200 km now anybody who's done Turing will know that means that's going to basically be two days uh pretty safely the sort of distance you're covering I mean some people might want to cycle much further but uh 100 km a day is generally ambitious enough particularly on the terrain you find in Scotland or in Dy G so that would do me um so that's my first starting point okay so you have your two batteries uh they'll give you that 200 km range and the next issue you're going to face is how long does it take to recharge those batteries and that's something actually lots of people they don't it's not necessarily something you think about in advance or that you realize those options so those big options the Bosch system for instance comes with a 2 Amp recharger a 4 amp recharger and a six amp recharger and and basically uh if you've got the 2 Amp recharger and you buy a 6 amp recharger then you're probably going to recharge almost three times as fast right so the difference H in terms of the sort of touring I'm doing is if I'm waiting for a ferry and there's an opportunity to plug in or doesn't plug on the ferry or maybe I'm having a meal in a restaurant or in a bar you know I can probably plug in and charge for about two hours uh if I have the six amp charger uh that will give me pretty close to being a full charge uh I mean the thing with the other thing to understand with with the batteries is if you're doing that sort of spontaneous recharging it takes almost as much time to charge that last 20% as the first 80% so don't feel you have to have all Pips fully recharged The Battery Technology itself is is fine with you doing that you're not really going to do damage um but anyway so 2 hours for a single battery uh 4 hours for two batteries and I'd be pretty much able to do another 200 km so what difference does carrying that additional charger mean well I've got my two Chargers here with me uh this is the standard bar charger the 4 amp charger and this is the six amp charger it's a little heavier it's a little heavier it's a little bulkier but really does not much difference at all in terms of the game you're actually going to make and in terms of the uh technological upgrades you can do this is actually one of the cheapest I think this only cost me about 120 quid on battery on the other hand could be costing you up to €800 at the moment I paid less than that cuz I I got it off of frite online think it was still about 650 or something in that region so there this the this immediately is enabling you to cover uh much greater distances than you will be able to and then to charge uh quickly so the charging thing is the next thing I'm going to talk about a bit more uh because what we're talking about we're not talking about having a hotel room here uh you know where you can plug in you've got full control about it you're talking about making use of whatever opportunities exist out there to charge and I've been doing this no problem at all I've done it nine days running uh I've NE I've never had a kind of accommodation where I could plug in I've just spontaneously charged wherever I could find a plug basically and so if you're doing that then the next thing you actually want to do this is is relatively cheap but also really important is think about what sort of what are you plugging in like obviously you can directly plug in your charger into the mains that's fine uh but what if you arrive somewhere and there is only there's no plugs available right well so one of the things you can do is you can get one of these dual sockets so that plugs in and then it gives you two sockets and say there's a lamp or something in the corner or television you plug it out you plug it back in again and then you plug your charger into the second connection Point uh and where you go um the second thing is that you're not just going to be wanting to charge your battery your bike battery generally you're going to be wanting to charge a phone you're probably going to be wanting to recharge a power pack uh in my case I've also got a watch that I need to keep charg and because I record my Cycles I've also got the GoPro camera that I need to charge so that's a whole load of thing other things so don't just get a a a plug that goes from one to two get one that also has uh charging sockets for USB built into it and I have two of these that's this one and this second one now the second one uh is great because this is actually a universal adapter so I can travel anywhere with this it's going expain with me shortly um it's actually got four sockets on the bottom 1 2 3 four two of these are USB C and A fifth one on the side and that's a USBC high power so that will charge my phone really fast it will also charge my a USBC power pack really fast it's very valuable so that basically means you get your battery charged up and you get everything else charged up a couple of hours charging a day basically should be enough to keep you on the road the other thing I would recommend you do with this if you have the spare battery and you have the charger um is get yourself a couple of waterproof uh stuff sacks and basically in your Piers or whatever bags you're using keep the battery in waterproof stuff sack keep the charger in a waterproof stuff sack I've had the experience where I got caught in torrential rain at one of my panels I hadn't closed it properly it partially flooded and it blew my power bank um so fortunately that was just a 50 cost and not a €700 cost or €40 cost uh but obviously the problem with that happen on the road is not just that you're going to have to pay the replacement costs but also that perhaps there isn't an opportunity to replace you know you're somewhere in the middle of nowhere there's no A bash dealers nearby maybe you're going to I'm not quite sure what you would do maybe you would you mail order and wait for two or three days for something to arrive bad situation you don't want to get caught in that and it's easy to get caught by torrential rain so couple of stuff sacks they're very cheap you know you're not even talking a quid each put your electronics in those stuff sacks H same for your phone recharger and all the rest of it don't get cut out like me so the next item I'm going to talk about is uh an upgrade this year I've only just added to it um and I've been Road testing it now for I would say about 800 km so I did a quick review of IT what I initially got us H this is a more detailed okay I now have experience of this and I know how it works and that's the controller on the bike um so this is the nion controller uh which is an upgrade to the standard controller that comes with the Bosch it's both getting the controller and unfortunately getting it fitted will probably end up costing you a fair bit of money I think this cost me about 500 Al together um and most of uh what the controller does mostly added features they have no relevance to this video about how you get more range basically gives you a lot more data about your Sion that's very interesting uh but doesn't extend your range at all however it does have one thing that when I saw I went oh I wonder if that would extend range much and after testing it out I can tell you it extends the range massively and what that is is with the nonon controller and I think one of the other high-end Bosch controllers you can set up your own assist levels so with the existing Bosch controller the Eco assist level uh is is a 40% assist right um and if you've done any ebike touring already you'll know if you're using that eco mode you get much better range than you do if you use one of the high assist Ro uh uh ones so this is what I'm going to talk about in a minute as well about behaviors and how the way you cycle can can affect the distance you do but with the nion what this has enabled me to do is to build in a couple of of lower assists right um and so what I've done is I created an assist mode then instead of being about 40% is about 25% and instead of going all the way up to 25 km an hour which is the legal cutout it starts to reduce the assistance at about 18 km an hour now the re the reason I did that there two reasons one is just purely in terms of physics uh the amount of energy that goes in to keep you moving above 18 19 20 20 21 km an hour is greater than the amount that's going in to keep you moving at 15 16 17 km an hour that's to do with wind resistance and Road resistance and all that sort of stuff that's so that's one of the reasons but the second reason is and I'm sure you have this experience yourself when you're cycling around uh you generally you've got two sorts of experiences one of which is the sighting is good maybe you're going downhill maybe it's flat maybe the wind's behind you it's easy enough your own power to get yourself up to and Beyond the 25 km an hour legal cut off particularly coming downhill and and you can spend quite a lot of time in that mode and so some ebik tourists what they'll actually do is they'll turn off the control units going downhill so you know I don't actually think you save much battery doing that because mostly not putting something in and you're having to fiddle backwards and forwards a bit uh quite a bit H so instead with me putting saying okay I'm going to start reducing support at about 18 km an hour what that basically means is if I'm cycling downhill certainly and also if I'm cycling on the flat I pretty quickly the bike will just not be giving me any assistance and I don't need it you know it's possible I could go a kilometer an hour faster if I had more assistance but I don't need that assistance and perhaps what I do need is the range so so I thought I'd better show you what this actually looks like in practice uh so you basically log into the Bosch website you can also do this via the app they give you uh and you click on edit custom riding modes uh I think You' have to pay €4 to unlock this feature so not very much anyway and then when you've done that you get a graph that shows for each of the four modes how the assist works so this is the one I've already set up uh for my customized lower assist modes and you can see this this lowest one mode one uh which is where Eco would be in the other one instead of being a 40% assist is approximately a 25% assist but also that once you hit 15 km an hour it starts to fade out uh mode two is about a 50% same sort of thing and then so on up and I've I've left mode four as a really high one because that basically is the one I hit if I hit absolutely amazingly you know like 20% plus uh gradient Hill or sometimes at the end of the day when the sun's beginning to set and I need to get wherever I'm going but that's basically how it works so you can drag each of these points individually you just grab one to show you like that uh to basically give it the sort of plot you want you can't use this by the way to go faster than the 25 km so do anything like that with it um but anyway with so with this setup uh basically I hoped to extend the range of the batteries and in practice I have found I really have I've greatly extended the range uh so it's definitely uh a real wow that makes a difference if range is by far the most important thing to you and in some circumstances uh where for whatever reason you're a long distance between charging possibilities that is going to be very important so how does this work out in practice uh so I haven't yet done a multi-day tour uh with it so I'm not going to give you incredibly definitive answers but I have done some really big distances uh the longest of which was about 130 km in a day and done some big hills and what I have found is that with say the 500 watt battery instead of looking at easily getting uh about 100 km out of it I can get easily and I'm talking easily now I get 180 km out it so I've almost dist doubled uh the potential range I'm covering two 500 wat batteries and suddenly you're looking at what's about 360 km and I suspect you could probably with that I I am occasionally going up to a second and a third mode on steep hills uh so I I would get more if I really struck strictly stayed in that lower range and is that needed well I think there's two circumstances you might need it now what I have found is that the existing four range modes were absolutely fine cycling around Ireland and Scotland mostly wild camping I could keep batteries charged day after day I could keep going uh that wasn't a particular problem at all so it's not essential at all in those circumstances however um if I wanted to do uh longer distances in places that are more isolated and I'm thinking I'm thinking about cycling from Dublin to Cape Town in about three or four years time H then having a system where I could have very little assist well not very little actually it's still you still feel it it's still useful but I could have less assist and because of that I do 350 km would be massively useful to me really really really useful and the second the second one is if you somehow end up in a context where you can't find someone to charge that has not happened to me yet H it means if you're down to your last half charge on your last battery or something and you're going oh my God what am I going to do about this you can then go down to that much lower assist and you can gu another 100 km out it and you'll probably find somewhere to charge in that context uh so these are the uh the technological changes or upgrades that I've made which enable me to do ebike touring with wild camping no problem at all very straightforward covering and I you know as I said I've gone I think the longest period is maybe eight nights in a row where I've wild camped every one of those eight nights right I and in fact to be honest when I'm Turing I uh I can do that uh but my preference is more like maybe every four or five nights I get a hotel and that gives me a chance to wash myself wash my clothes get a full night sleep all that sort of stuff um but i' you know I I have gone longer than that it's definitely possible so if you're thinking of um ebik touring while camping while doing it and you're nervous about range and battery charging and all that sort of stuff I can absolutely reassure you that with this setup I've used you can keep going day after day are today and in practice it worked out uh you know the obvious fear is well maybe I can't find anywh to charge you know I mean if you look up at that northwest corner of Scotland that's one of the most that's very isolated for in European terms uh Ireland you know Dy go the K pin it's very isolated I've never really had much of a challenge at all finding somewhere to charge you know and and typically that's going to be a p I'm going I stop the afternoon I have a couple of points I'm plug in the battery while I'm charging that gives me another days uh uh coverage uh sometimes it's coffee shops in Scotland it was uh fairies cuz I was going up the islands I was got getting a lot of fairies and almost every Ferry waiting room had a plugnut and every often the fairies themselves if you looked around there was a plugnut uh so you know that was very straightforward a couple of community museums I've seen people in other countries say they recharging charges which is quite entertaining I haven't tried that but that kept me going so complete reassurance on that count okay so the other thing I was just going to touch on briefly um was uh behaviors and how that changes what your ranges so I mentioned earlier that some ebike cyclists what they do is they turn the motor off going downhill and they use that extended range clearly that that works uh you know only using the motor when you absolutely need it um otherwise keeping the bike as a as a manual bike that is going to mean you're going farther it kind of takes some of the fun out of it you know and and add some of the pain kind do you want that assist so the other major thing I've discovered um and it sort of natural and it comes to you is that at different times of the day and at different times of your trip you want different levels of assistance and if you go into that H I think you actually end up getting more range so what do I mean what I mean is first thing in the morning I set off I'm full of energy you know I keep it in the low lowest assist even going up relatively steep hills I don't need much effort I'm you know I'm all excited about the day ahead and I'm going and that probably also applies to whenever I take a break later in the day the next 20 minutes or whatever I coffee get going late in the evening oh there's a big hill between me and where I want to camp I'm going to be much more inclined to turn up that assist and get help being pushed up that hill uh and what I've realized is that actually early in the day if you come across a really nasty Hill Turn up the assists because otherwise what happens is you Bach your legs early in the day and then you then with all the hills you kind of need to have a little bit of assist so think about it sort of learn through experience and you'll probably find that yeah in the morning you really don't need it much but perhaps you hit a really nasty heel and do use it for that nasty heel even if you can force your force yourself up it and then the last thing I often do um if I'm getting towards the end of the day all what I keep doing is I keep trying to do too much distance uh so I get towards the end of the day where I have an idea I'm going to camp at that spot there i' I've had a look at my Google VD on my video using uh Google Maps satellite view and Street View in terms of how I locate while camping spots but it's very often experience for me is it's starting to get dark and the spot I think I can camp out is 20 km away I kind of want to be there before dark uh so I can have a look around maybe even have to have a look somewhere else H so in that that's the other context in which I'm probably going to lean down turn up the assist and do most of that last 20 kilm at 25 km an hour or whatever get there as quickly as possible and have a look around anyway thanks for listening uh I'm about to take this to Spain I'm about to do 2,000 km in the bass country in Northern Spain going right out to the Atlantic coast a big loop and coming back uh I I'll be using the different mode so I'll be reporting back both as I'm doing it and um when I finish that H and I've got some quite ambitious days uh where I'm doing 2,200 meters of climbing because the mountains they' got good mountains there I think it's probably going to be quite spectacular uh but it's going to give you a much better idea about some of these ideas about range where the limitations are I'll let you know about that H give the channel follow so you'll get updates um uh I'll be when I when I come back I'll posting video compilations of that trip I may do some live video at when I'm over there H but the other thing you can also do is if you follow my Instagram account when I'm Ching I literally stop at the side of the road take a picture post it straight to Instagram maybe do a little bit of video uh or whatever else and I initially started doing that to be honest because friends and family who were worried about me uh going off wanted to know I was okay U I was just telling to follow follow an Instagram account so that I wasn't having to to message everybody individually and go everyone's gr hope you like that give the video a thumbs up if you did so it gets out to more people that's really useful for me for building the channel up and encourages me to keep going with this video uh and yeah I hope I'm going to see you on the road someday and let's get on with those ebik Adventures

2024-05-08 12:39

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