Ebikes and regenerative braking

One of the most common questions I get from people first encountering an electric-assist bike is “Does it charge while you pedal?” or “Does it have regenerative braking?”. This question shows me what a great marketing campaign Toyota and others have with respect to their hybrid cars. We hear “electric vehicle” and think “regenerative braking”. Or more unconsciouly, “free energy”. Well, unfortunately, you can’t get something for nothing in the energy world (at least not YET).

Today’s video addresses this most common question and what I tell people who ask it.

Two links to detailed analysis of Regenerative Braking (equations and calculations included – don’t say I didn’t warn you!)

http://www.ecospeed.com/regenbraking.pdf

http://www.ativsolutions.com/cblog/index.php?/archives/24-Regenerative-Braking.html

(below is a brief summary of the video)

Regenerative braking captures energy from momentum when you slow down. Momentum is a function of the speed you are going and the amount of mass(wieght) of the object. This is easy to relate to – a small ball thrown at you slowly is not going to hurt your hand when you catch it. Nether is a large, lightweight beach ball. But a large heavy ball or a ball moving fast at you might cause you to step out of the way.

In the vehicle world, a car is heavy and generally moves fast, so looses a lot of energy when is slows down. A bike is lightweight and generally moving much slower, so there is not as much energy to be lost (or gained).

In addition, bicyclists are very good at using their momentum when they ride. When you come to a stop sign, you probably slow down, but only as much as necessary to make sure it’s safe to cross. When you cruise down a hill, you get up speed that helps take you up the next hill. If you are spending this momentum energy to charge your battery, well then you’re not using it to get going again on the other side of the intersection or up the hill. Given that any form of energy transfer has some associated losses, it’s probably better to maintain your momentum for that uphill.

The other common question I get is “does the battery charge as you pedal?” While this seems like a great idea, what that means is that your leg power is now being used to charge a battery rather than make your bike go faster in the forward direction. i.e. it feels like pedaling with the brakes on. Now most people want biking to be easier, not harder. So they’d rather plug the battery in and use the 3-5 cents of energy to charge it up.

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So there you go! Please comment below. And remember to join or Facebook page or sign up (on the upper right) for our email list to stay in touch!

-Elise

Go By Bike is a daily video series that talks about how to be green by riding more and using your car less, including electric bikes, electric kits, cargo bikes, bike safety, and getting motivated to bike

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Replace your car with this load-carrying machine

If you’ve been thinking of going carfree, but have stuff or people to carry, then I’m sure you’ve been looking for options on how you can do that. An electric cargo bike is a great car-replacement vehicle for most of the trips we do to the store, to drop-off and pick-up children, to get to work and back, and to attend social outings. The cargo bike gives you the capacity to carry what you need, and the motor makes it so you don’t have to kill yourself pedaling the extra weight.

Your excuses for not biking will disappear with one of these babies! And you’ll be LOVING the $8,000* your saving a year by selling your second car!  (* According to edmonds.com, the average price of owning a car in the US is $8,000 a year, and that was calculated when gas was just $1.50 per gallon!).

In this video, I give a brief overview of the Electric Yuba Mundo, or E-Mundo. The Mundo is the “pick up” of the cargo biking world with 400lbs of cargo carrying capacity. The Cycle 9 electric mundo is designed to fit most people’s needs right out of the box. Unless you’ve got killer hills, this kit will transport you and your stuff wherever you want to go (if you DO have killer hills, ask about upgrading to our high torque version!).

Leave me your comments below!

And don’t forget to join our Facebook or Twitter communities for a great resource on lifestyle biking, sustainable transportation and electric info.

-Elise

Go By Bike is a daily video series that talks about how to be green by riding more and using your car less, including electric bikes, electric kits, cargo bikes, bike safety, and getting motivated to bike

If you like this video, please  digg it, stumble upon it, tweet about it or post it to delicious or facebook using one of the links below

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Electric bikes.

They’re the buzz word of the bike industry lately. Will 2010 be their year? or will they burn quickly as a fad and fade out as in the past? As a rider and dealer of electric bikes, I’ve watched the offerings grow from small, obscure companies, to today with a plethora of options, including major bike manufacturers jumping on the wagon. I have to say I’m pretty impressed by the offerings. Clearly the industry thinks these are going to be big and small and large companies alike are gambling big bucks on developing products and getting dealers to support them. Will they hit it big? I don’t know, but here are a few of my thoughts on the question.

My first ebike

I’ve been interested in electric bikes for many years. My first bike was a ZAP bike in the early 1990s that I shared with my significant other. It employed a roller that went against your tire to help propel you forward, and I used it to assist me on my 12 mile each-way commute across town. The roller system worked ok as long as the road was dry, and you stopped occasionally to adjust the pressure on the tire. The battery was a golf cart battery strapped to the rear rack, and if I spared it’s use to the hills only, it would last all the way to work and half way home before giving up the ghost. But it did provide just enough help for me conquer my commute, a large factor being the few extra minutes it saved me.
By contrast, today’s ebikes are so much better, they barely compare. With my current electric kit, I can easily ride 20 miles or more, keeping my speed at 15-20mph over hills, even with cargo! The kit works reliably rain or shine, and the battery is 3 times the capacity for the same size and weight as my original ZAP kit. But most importantly, the kit has allowed me to free myself from my car, addressing my concerns about peak oil, environmental degradation, and quality of life for me, my kids, and my community.

The oil problem

As bike commuters, we generally understand the benefits of biking versus driving. We know that biking is healthy for us. We know that driving uses lots of resources. We know that our resources are finite and our environment is being polluted. But when I really started looking into the numbers, I was shocked. You see, through a friend I learned about the problem of Peak Oil. Peak Oil is the concept that at some point the world will have reached the peak efficiency of oil extraction worldwide. That means that all the easily extracted oil will be used up, and the stuff that’s left will be more difficult, costly, and time consuming to extract. Many geologists argue persuasively that peak oil is at hand, but that we don’t realize it in the marketplace yet. And the recent disaster in the Gulf of Mexico just underscores that drilling for oil is risky and has lots of associated costs.

Once you dive into the consequences of a future of more expensive and declining supply of oil, all kinds of scary facts start popping out – oil is required for the production of plastics which are critical in the health care industry. It’s heavily embedded in the production and transport of our food supply. It’s used in the pharmecudical industry, and will be required to manufacture and deploy solar panels, wind turbines, busses, bicycles and all the other elements of an alternative energy future.
Yet, here we are, burning up oil by driving around. Over 60% of the US oil supply goes to transportation, much of it personal and short distance. The internal combustion engine uses only 20% of the energy contained in gasoline while the rest is wasted in inefficiencies. And most of the energy consumed in driving is to propel the car – a big, heavy, metal box – not us or our stuff.
Clearly, we need to change our paradigm about transportation if we’re going to have an effect on this problem. And the sooner we can do that, the better off all of us will be. Once I realized this, I thought the best place to start would be with myself. I’ve always been a casual biker, recreationally and for transportation. But I had a problem if I was going to ride my bike more, and it came in the shape of 3 small people.

The kid problem

You see, I had 3 small people under the age of 5 to take care of and not only did they need to be transported, but I needed to have the energy to deal with them. After a lengthy internet search, a cargo bike was selected to transport them. But I didn’t live super close to town, and there were some big hills in the way. I didn’t think I could do it. I could barely pedal the bike up the 1st hill out of the driveway. This is where the electric assist kit transformed this into a realistic solution.
With my kit, I can pedal the bike even with 3 kids or a week’s worth of groceries, over 12 miles of hilly terrain. I can do it every day and it doesn’t take forever or leave me sweaty and exhausted. It’s become a realistic and competitive alternative to the car. And in fact, it’s become the preferred option most of the time as everyone enjoys riding the bike more than riding the car, especially Mom!

Setting up this bike actually was a life changing experience for me, so I started a bike shop to help other people realize their own dreams of using their car less and their bikes more. Electric assist has been a big part of this. We help a lot of people like myself who want to electrify cargo bikes. But we also help a lot of commuters with distances of over 3 miles to go. Some people are even riding 20 miles each way, and the electric assist just makes this commute much faster and more do-able. Instead of bike commuting one day a week, they’re doing it 3 or 5 days. We’ve also helped people with disabilities, people who are out of shape, and people who just want to have more fun riding their bikes. It’s been a pleasure watching all of these people dust off bikes and leave their cars in the garage. In my book, anything that enables people to do that is worth doing.
Would it be “better” if these people were able to bike under their own power without the assist? Maybe. But consider again this fact. The energy used by a typical electric bike is about 15 watt-hours (wh) per mile. The energy used by a typical car is 1,580 wh per mile. That means that you can ride your electric bike for 20 miles and use less energy than it would take to drive your car 0.25 mile. That’s a pretty startling statistic.

The adoption of electric bikes

Over the past 20 years, electric bike technology has made huge strides to where it is generally reliable and easy to use. This is not to say that everything out there is quality – there are still a lot of low quality and low powered bikes out there. But companies manufacturing the bikes and kits have started paying attention to what consumers want and I think we’ll see considerable weeding out of the stuff that is not worth it.
One of the biggest barriers to electric bikes in the marketplace that I see today is actually the reluctance of independent bike shops to take them on. Your local bike shop employees are probably dominated by hard core bike enthusiasts who wouldn’t consider an electric bike for themselves, and so are not very interested in selling them. I’ve also seen considerable reluctance on the part of mechanical staff to be interested or even willing to work on electric bikes, simply because it’s something pretty different than what they’ve seen before. The door has been left open for new specialty shops focused on electric bikes to pop up, and also for big-box retailers to get into the market. These retailers, in combination with the internet, have served to grow the market considerably. As the products increase in quality (and thus decrease in maintenance and support), and as consumer demand grows, I think local bike shops will come around. This would be a great thing, because local shops will always be the best place to get the service and support that bikes of all types need.
So, will electric bikes become a big part of the bike industry? My answer is, I sure hope so.  The potential they have to encourage and enable people to ride more is huge. Both hard core riders who commute longer distances or are aiming for the car-free lifestyle, and for casual riders who would ride more if it was easier and more convenient. And riding bikes is good for our souls, our communities, and our planet.

This article originally appeared on CommuteByBike on June 2, 2010

Head to Head!

A little friendly competition – the electric Madsen with 150 lbs of cargo versus the lightweight road bike. Short video today for your enjoyment…

I’m sure there are many road warriors out there who will appreciate that the electric bike is not ALWAYS faster. (However, I’d love to see them tote the 3 children and still be that fast – different strokes for different folks).

-Elise

Go By Bike is a daily video series that talks about how to be green by riding more and using your car less, including electric bikes, electric kits, cargo bikes, bike safety, and getting motivated to bike

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New ebike headlights are in!

Part of my ride home is over dark country roads with no overhead lights, so having a bright headlight is key. We recently got in new ebike headlights that are powered directly from your ebike battery and are SUPER bright. Check out this new video showing the new light.

You can find this light in our online store at under the Electric a-la-cart section

Ride On!

-Elise

Go By Bike is a daily video series that talks about how to be green by riding more and using your car less, including electric bikes, electric kits, cargo bikes, bike safety, and getting motivated to bike

Get notified! Sign UP using the box to the right to be notified of new video topics and other great happenings at Cycle 9

If you like this video, please  digg it, stumble upon it, tweet about it or post it to delicious or facebook using one of the links below

It’s Summer in the South!

We’re well into summer now with scorching hot 90+ days, humidity, afternoon thundershowers and the like. Are you still biking? Here’s one thing I was thinking about (and very grateful for) on the last 100 degree day….

Go By Bike is a daily video series that talks about how to be green by riding more and using your car less, including electric bikes, electric kits, cargo bikes, bike safety, and getting motivated to bike.

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Up close and personal – the Big Dummy with Stokemonkey

Now together again, two classics of the cargo biking world: Surly’s Big Dummy cargo bike and the Stokemonkey from Clever Chimp. Both of these products first emerged on the cargo biking scene in spring of 2008. Both sold out by mid-summer and were unavailable for awhile, building anticipation. Now both are available in new and improved forms.

Check them out here for an up close and personal view of how the stokemonkey works with it’s friend, the Big Dummy. If you’re in our area, come by the shop for a test ride – we have one set up and all ready to go.

- Elise

Go By Bike is a daily video series that talks about how to be green by riding more and using your car less, including electric bikes, electric kits, cargo bikes, bike safety, and getting motivated to bike

If you like this video, please  digg it, stumble upon it, tweet about it or post it to delicious or facebook using one of the links below

BionX kit “reads your mind”

In this episode of Go By Bike I show the BionX ebike conversion kit and talk about how it works.

Find the BionX hub motor kit here:

http://www.cycle9.com/c9store/electric-bicycle-kits-c-5/bionx-pl-350-rear-hub-motor-kit-p-48

-Elise

Go By Bike is a daily video series that talks about how to be green by riding more and using your car less, including electric bikes, electric kits, cargo bikes, bike safety, and getting motivated to bike.

If you like this video, please  digg it, stumble upon it, tweet about it or post it to delicious or facebook using one of the links below.

How do you take care of a battery?

In today’s episode of Go By Bike, I talk about one of the most common myths of ebike batteries – the idea of battery memory. How do you take care of a battery and is it necessary to discharge it all the way sometimes? Listen in for an important lesson that could help you avoid costly battery damage.

-Elise

Go By Bike is a daily video series that talks about how to be green by riding more and using your car less, including electric bikes, electric kits, cargo bikes, bike safety, and getting motivated to bike

If you like this video, please  digg it, stumble upon it, tweet about it or post it to delicious or facebook using one of the links below

Introducing my Daily Video Series – Go By Bike!

Today is my inaugural video of my NEW daily video series – Go By Bike! I started this series to talk about how to ride more and use your car less, including electric bikes, electric kits, cargo bikes, bike safety, and getting motivated to bike. Using your car less reduces your carbon footprint, saves energy, helps the environment, keeps you healthy, and makes your community a nicer place to live, so overall most people would agree it’s a good thing.

In today’s episode of Go By Bike, I show you how I set up my bicycle to carry 3 kids on my morning (and afternoon) commute. This may seem like a lot to carry, but I keep it fun, easy and practical. Check out my daily ride below…

What’s your daily commute vehicle? Post a comment and let me know.

Over and out…..

-Elise

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