Batteries, Blackbird batteries, more batteries, all batteries. If you have
questions about how to maintain your battery for your electric bike, I have answers.
If you're wondering how many cycles you can get out of a lithium battery for an electric
bike. If you want to know what you should do with your ebike battery and cold temperatures,
if you want to know what percentage you should charge your ebike battery up to.
And if you have questions about how to keep your battery properly balanced,
and finally, what should you do if you need to store your battery for a prolonged period of time?
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Maintaining ebike batteries is not hard. In fact, in my opinion, they are the easiest
often when people think about battery maintenance, they're thinking of lead
acid batteries, you have liquid that you're having to replace.
It's always important to wear protection, but taking the clinic eye protection,
making sure that the final electrolyte level is running below the bottom of the guideline.
When I was. A kid actually got battery acid in my eyes.
It turns out heal quickly who knew sometimes you have to put a maintainer on the battery, basically
a special charger to keep things topped off, but lithium batteries are so much easier. Now that
being said, I still want to make sure you get the absolute most you can out of your ebike battery.
Tip number one is, Don't discharge, a lithium battery completely with lead acid that is
okay with nickel metal hydride or nicad, or different other older formats.
Some of them actually recommended a full discharge for certain reasons.
But with lithium batteries, that is a big, no, you do not want to fully discharge the cells to zero.
And if you do that, you'll be fine. That's probably all you really need to know.
Okay. I'm just kidding. There's actually more than that, but that is the first tip.
Don't discharge down to zero voltage. That's basically unrecoverable and not good. Now,
does that mean that you can't go for a ride on your ebike until the battery dies and shuts off?
Well, no, it doesn't actually, because every battery has something inside that is called a, BMS
I feel like this is some sort of mystery device that no one gets to see. So let's go find it.
This is probably what you think an ebike battery looks like, but this is just an outer shell or
plastic case. And there's nothing in there because it's already out. This is what it looks like on
the inside. This is a, BMS or battery management system. It's basically a smart little circuit
board and you have outputs that are going to the terminals, which would connect to your cradle.
You can see there's a little wires going all over the place. BMS is monitoring the voltage of
individual cells. So to put this simply, this battery knows not just when
this cell gets down or up to a certain voltage. It also knows when this one goes to a certain
voltage or this one it's looking at a collection or a group of the battery management system will
actually cut off the battery when the voltage gets down to a certain point
to prevent your battery from getting damaged.
So when you take your ebike for a ride and you drain the battery until the bars on your display,
go down to nothing. And at some point the whole bike just shuts off
the voltage on your bike is actually not at zero or anywhere close to it.
The cells actually have a fair amount of voltage. Left, but that's where they need to be cut off
for longevity. If you drain them down to zero, like I said, they'd be unrecoverable. Now,
do I recommend doing that? Kind of running it all the way to the minimum?
No, I probably wouldn't do that on a regular basis.
But that's what the BMS is for often a question is how many cycles will they get? And a little
bit of confusion is caused sometimes when I talk about a cycle and what does that actually mean?
And basically that is a full discharge and charge cycle. So if you're starting with the
battery at 100% capacity and you drain it down to where that BMS effectively cuts the voltage off.
That is a full discharge cycle. Now I've seen different numbers
thrown around S equals one half a T squared. Whereas is the altitude
a, is the gravity constant of 32 when T is the time it took for that rock to come back.
But usually somewhere between 800 and 1000 cycles is what these individual cells are rated for.
I've seen some people say as low as 500, if you say, go ride your bike for 20 miles on a full
discharge cycle, and you could do that. A thousand times that would be 20,000 miles. That's, that's a
lot of mileage on an eBike. If you only get half of that, you know, 500 cycles, then obviously
that's going to be half that still be about 10,000 miles before you wear your e-bike battery out.
And I want to be clear that if you go from say a hundred percent down to half of your
battery capacity, instead of draining it all the way to zero, that is effectively only.
Half of a discharge cycle. Now, when we get into charging,
this is where there's a lot of interesting information about charge percentages.
Most ebike chargers that come with your electric bike are going to charge to 100% every single
time. And. That's okay. I don't want anyone to think like they're killing their battery
by charging to 100%. Those cycle ranges I just gave you are normal expectations. If you are
charging to a hundred percent, you want the most range you can get out of your battery.
If you want to extend the overall life span of your battery, you can charge. To slightly less
than full capacity and there's good and bad things about that. Let me explain the good first, have
you charged to 90%? That's effectively going to be easier on the internal components of those cells.
They will actually last longer as in instead of 800 cycles, maybe if you go to 90%,
you'll get a thousand cycles. Some studies suggest that maybe at
80% charge, you might get double the number of cycles before that battery dies. Personally,
I always charge my ebike to 100%. Do I know that in theory, it might last longer at 90%.
Yes, it might, but I know that I'm going to lose 10% range every time. If I don't charge it fully.
And you know, it's a trade off now, what is the downside? I think this is something that's often
overlooked and that has to do with balancing it's. We're jumping back to that BMS. When the
lowest of the lowest cells goes down to a certain cutoff point, it's going to shut your battery off.
And also in the highest gets to a highest point. It's going to turn off the charging function. So
it protects the cells from being charged to too high of a voltage and potentially blowing up.
As you can see, that's a great way to get a house fires.
We definitely don't that most of the BMS is used on the market, require the battery to be at 100%
to balance the cells. And what they're doing is basically allowing each cell to be charged
up to a certain point and then stop. If you don't charge to a hundred percent,
some of those are not capable of balancing the cells.
Some will get lower, some will get higher. And your battery is not going to perform
as well and may die prematurely. You may not get as much range out of it. So even if you do
charge to 80 or 90% increase the overall life expectancy, it's a good idea to still
charge to a hundred percent on occasion to make sure that the cells are balanced.
Now, what about storage? And I'm not talking about. Putting your batteries on a shelf. And
where do you physically put them? Them? 340. I mean, if this guy's got this kind of energy
and this kind of artistic guy, I want to see what else he's got.
What is the best? Percent of charge or voltage to store your battery.
Different voltages will actually cause different things to happen within the battery. Now,
typically most batteries will slowly drain or lose voltage over time. So you really
do not want to leave your battery dead
for weeks or month, you may go plug your battery in and nothing happens. It doesn't want to charge
because the cells have gradually dipped below the lowest safe voltage to charge.
The BMS is not going to allow those cells to charge your battery is toast. Now,
if it's going to be a few days, maybe even a few weeks charging to a hundred percent and leaving
the battery that way is just fine. Let's say you live in an area where it's snows
really heavily in the winter, and you don't feel like riding out in the cold.
And, you know, you're not going to ride for two or three months, the best storage number that I've
seen based on lithium ion cell studies shows to be around 70%. You could charge the battery up to
around that 70%. You could look at the voltage on your display or some other number to kind
of gauge. If you might be in that ballpark, or you could charge your battery up to a hundred percent,
go for a five mile ride around the neighborhood to bring it down a little bit.
Now do batteries like being left out in the cold? The answer to that would be no.
If you leave your ebike outside or in the garage and the temperature is freezing or below,
do not charge your battery. They really, really don't like it. And unfortunately you can cause
permanent damage. It's better to take your battery inside.
Oops!
Bring your battery inside, let it warm up to room temperature, and it will be much,
much happier now for just charging. That's a little bit different. It's okay. To start
with your battery at room temperature, take your bike from inside and go on a cold ride outside.
What you may notice if it's really cold is a loss in performance. Meaning
your battery won't produce quite as much power.
The bike might feel a little sluggish. It may not have the same amount of range.
If, you know, you're going to be out for a while,
I would recommend it insulating the battery. In some way.
I've seen people design custom sleeves that go around them.
I've seen people put their batteries in a triangle bag in the frame. Anything you
can do to keep it a little bit warmer in freezing temperatures is only going
to help. Not only the performance. But the overall longevity of the battery.
Do you have squeaky brakes?
Do you not stop on time?
Are you looking for more performance?
Then go check out this video for an easy way to upgrade your stock
mechanical disc brakes, to something with better performance.