On switching to an e-bike
Electric bikes herald a new approach to taking it easy. I had read that e-bike riders tend to be healthier on average than conventional bike riders, and after a week of riding one, I get it. Riding an e-bike still requires energy expenditure, but when the going gets hard, you can increase the amount of assistance you get from the bike. It means 4 or 5 hours in the saddle isn’t exhausting, even with hills or headwinds. It means days of 70 or 80 km seem equivalent to days of 40 or 50 km on our other bikes. And it means a lesser need for rest days1.
Our new bikes are what Velo de Ville call ‘SUVs’, by which they mean gravel bikes built for touring. As well as their motors, the fatter tyres and front suspension make them a lot more comfortable in gravel, mud and sand, and over cobbled European streets. So far our new bikes have been winners.
Using pedal assist
It took a while to learn the best approach to using the motors. The Bosch motor has four levels of pedal assist, called Eco, Tour+, Sport and Turbo, the last of which is indicated by an alarming red. With a couple of months of getting used to it, I’ve found myself primarily using Eco (green) on the flat river trails without a headwind, but switching up to Tour+ (blue) when the going gets a bit tougher up a hill or into a headwind. After a month and a half of urban riding around Avignon, I also found myself using Tour+ as a default because it allows me to accelerate at lights as fast as cars, making it a much safer proposition.
Sport (purple) and Turbo have been reserved primarily for the domain of steeper hills. It took a while to latch on to the importance of being in the right gear. On a steep hill, neither Sport nor Turbo are going to assist much at all if you are in too high a gear. But if you switch to a lower gear (i.e a larger cog) so that the force required to push the bike forward is less, they provide much greater assistance. Almost all of my first 1500 km of riding were on flat river and rail trails, so it wasn’t until the more mountainous roads past Marseille that we really got into the swing of changing down gears progressively as the slope increased. It means going a bit slower, and requires some effort, but the going is really quite easy. Our first really big day of climbing was 1050 m of climbing from Cassis to Toulon - an effort that would have left us reeling and exhausted on our normal bikes. But even fully laden we were feeling spritely enough to take a detour to the lookout at the village perché of Évenos near the final high point before Toulon.
We elected to get the Bosch motors with the greatest torque (85 Nm), and gearsets with the greatest range (11-speed). These were certainly enough to get us up 12% gradients fully laden on our ride to Toulon. I think we were advised well.
Battery range
The most common question we get about our e-bikes is what sort of range you can get out of our 750 W batteries. It’s a difficult question to give a straight answer to. When you open the Bosch flow app with a fully charged battery it tells you you have range of 45-150 km. Having ridden the bikes for a few months, this now seems right.
I’ve never come close to doing 150 km in a day, but on my daily rides along the flat Via Rhona, my battery usage suggested 150 km would be possible. With a strong tailwind from Valence to Viviers, I rode 77 km and used only 38% of the battery (a fair portion of the day was spent being pushed along by the wind faster than 25 km/h beyond which the motor stops assisting).
And our first day of serious climbing from Cassis to Toulon suggests a low range of 45 km is realistic: after the first steep climb out of Cassis (250 m rise in 6 km), I had used 82% of the battery charge, suggesting that a constant climb of 1300 m over 33 km might be the limit for one battery charge. Fortunately looking ahead to the Alps, it seems that no single climb between towns will exceed ~ 1000 m (we shall see!). So, given that a single 1300 m climb without some downhill is an unlikely scenario, the lower limit of 45 km on a battery charge seems reasonable. (After our 62 km ride from Cassis to Toulon with a 1050 m ascent, my battery was down to 27%.)
I (Chris) specified my battery usage above because, since Maree has joined me, I have been surprised to find that every day, I consistently use about 10% more battery charge than her. I initially found this surprising because we know that I generally push harder (Maree generally needs to be on a higher motor setting to keep up with me going up hills2). Well, after a bit of nerdy maths, I managed to work out that my fully laden bike (bike plus baggage plus body) weighs about 20% more than Maree’s. This weight difference translates directly to the difference in energy required to lift our bikes (or ride them up) a given height. So, our 20% weight differences and me using 10% more battery each day would equate to me expending 10% more energy than Maree.
Battery charging
Charging the batteries has never been a problem in our travels. Every place we have stayed has had a place we can store our bikes. It’s always easier if there is a power point in the storage place so that we can plug the charger directly into our bikes, but it’s not too much of a hassle to take the battery out of our bikes and take them into our accommodation to charge them there. (They weigh a few kg each, so it’s a bit of a hassle). Only one hotel to date (which shall remain nameless) has had the cheek to ask for payment to charge your bike, which I got around by taking my battery out and taking it to my room (5€ they asked! when surely the electricity required to charge a fully drained 750 W battery would cost perhaps 20c).
When we chose to get the biggest available batteries (750 W), the bike shop in Melbourne advised us to get 4-A chargers, lest we didn’t have enough time to charge our batteries each night on our travels. Chris was given a 4-A charger on picking up his bike at the factory, and found that he was able to recharge the battery within 2-3 hours every night.
When Maree’s bike was delivered to Avignon, it came with a 2-A charger. We initially were a little concerned that we hadn’t got what we ordered. But Pascal at the the bike shop advised us that a 2-A charger is better to prolong the life of the battery. Since then we have taken to using only Maree’s 2-A charger to charge both our batteries. One goes on when we arrive at our destination in the afternoon, and is invariably fully charged by bed-time, and the second battery charges over night. Easy!
The mysteries of the motor control
It was not until we needed to change a tube in a flat rear tyre to a tube that was not quite right that we discovered the purpose of the magnetised block secured on the rear valve. The block wouldn’t fit over the new, larger valve, so I put it away, and attempted to head off. The control started off fine, but after a few metres turned orange (as opposed to the green/blue/purple/red of the four power settings), and the pedal assist stopped. (Of course this was at an inopportune time at the bottom of a hill).
After a bit of googling, it became apparent that the block is the ‘rim magnet’, which the controller uses as a speed sensor. It the magnet is removed, the controller can’t measure the speed, returns an error, and stops the motor. I tried putting the magnet on the front wheel, and that worked for a while, but the orange returned further down the road. It seems the sensor for the magnet counts the number of revolutions past the motor, and it needs to be near the motor on the rear wheel. (I managed to wedge the magnet part way down the valve)
Footnotes
At least from an exertion point of view. I have been looking forward to some time to catch up on non-tour related matters (and of course, takeiteasybiketouring matters).↩︎
That we are now able to climb hills at the same pace is another reason that e-bikes have made the take-it-easy touring experience much better.↩︎