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8 E-bike Battery Tips for Longer Life
Jun 14,2022
With proper care, an e-bike battery will last a thousand charges or more – that’s three years of riding time if you use it for a week each cycle. If neglected, however, even the best e-bike battery will give out and die much sooner. And considering that high-quality e-bike batteries don’t come cheap, it’s in your best financial interest to give them plenty of love and care.
Here are eight simple tips to extend the life of your e-bike’s battery:
1. Keep Your Service Schedule
Keeping up with your e-bike maintenance schedule is essential to maintaining a long-lasting battery. We recommend bringing your e-bike in for maintenance every eight months, but also a little less frequently if you don’t ride it every day.
2. Use The Right Mode At The Right Time
Are you a fan of throttle mode or pedal assist? Our electric bikes have both options built into the motor.
In either case, you should weigh when to let the motor do the work and when to ride with your pedal power. The more the motor has to work, the heavier the load on the battery – not to mention the extra charging. Use the thrust sparingly so that the battery lasts longer.
3. Build a Safe Charging Station
Lithium batteries (by far the most common battery type for e-bikes) aren’t designed to be fully charged or discharged. For most e-bikes, the target charge is between 20% and 80% of maximum capacity.
While this means you’ll only get up to 80% of your potential maximum range, the upside is that your expensive battery won’t need replacing for many years to come. Don’t sure when you can take the battery off the charger? Take a light timer, set it and forget it.
4. Don't Discharge The Battery Fully Regular
Although we recommend charging the battery before it drops below 20%, sometimes you’ve no choice but to let it run down on the drive home. But don’t worry: while it’s not good practice to let your battery run down occasionally, it won’t kill it completely.
Avoid completely draining your battery as often as possible to keep it in top shape.
5. Stay Away From Extreme Temperatures
Batteries don’t like it when they get too hot or too cold, which can be difficult to handle in a city like Melbourne. What you can do, however, is store your bike in a cool, dry place, preferably one with good ventilation.
Avoid direct sunlight and stay away from stuffy storage areas that heat up in the summer sun. The optimum temperature is between 15 °C and 20 °C – aim for a place close to this value.
6. Keep The Battery Dry
A wet battery is a dead battery, so do your best to keep your battery dry. A short ride through the rain is no big deal, but you should avoid parking your bike in a damp place.
If mold is growing on the walls or condensation is dripping from the roof, that’s not the right place to store an e-bike long-term.
7. Store Your Battery At 60%
If you plan to not ride your e-bike for a few weeks or longer, charge (or discharge) it to 60% before putting it away. Lithium batteries love to idle at this level, and thus last much longer.
The battery will slowly discharge itself over time, so you should charge it about every three months.
8. Avoid Non-Standard Chargers
If you’ve lost or broken your charger, don’t be tempted to replace it with a cheap eBay knockoff. Using a fake charger will cause the battery to discharge at lightning speed, and in some cases even destroy it completely.
