How to (properly) ride a mid-drive electric bike

hey everyone mike here with ebikeschool.com and today i want to talk about mid-drive electric bicycles specifically how to actually ride a mid-drive e-bike and shift properly this is an important point because a lot of people get started on hub motor e-bikes especially if you got into electric bicycles on the lower end of the price spectrum now hub motor bikes are great i have several and i love them but the main difference is that unlike hub motors where the motor is actually in the center of the wheel and it's a single speed a mid-drive motor places the motor down by the pedals and it drives the bike through the pedal drivetrain that means that you're actually able to make use of all of your pedal gears and you can ride more efficiently tackle hills better that sort of thing the main caveat here though is while there are many advantages to mid-drives it is easy to do damage to your drivetrain if you're not aware of how to properly ride a mid-drive e-bike this is because mid-drives generally put out much more power and much more torque than an average human peddler so while you might be putting out 250-ish watts on a good day a powerful mid-drive motor can put out 500 750 or even more this is the bafong m620 motor it puts out almost 1500 watts it also does 160 newton meters of torque which is way more than any human could ever dream to put out but it's still going through a drive train specifically a chain and gear cogs that are meant for human peddlers that's why learning to shift on an e-bike like this is so important regardless of whether you've got a high power or a low power mid-drive motor now the whole name of the game and really the summary of how to properly use a mid-drive motor is just to keep that electric motor spinning quickly these motors they don't like to lug they don't like to be ridden with a lot of resistance keeping them at lower rpms because with that higher resistance they're going to create more heat they're going to wear down their internal components than their internal gears and they're going to do damage to your drivetrain if you're putting a lot of resistance for example if you're keeping it in the smallest cog all the time trying to ride at high speed you can use the smallest cog but it's really meant for when you're already at high speed and the biggest mistake that a lot of people make is they just leave their mid-drive setup with the gear in the highest gear that's the smallest cog out here and when you start from a stop in the highest gear you'll hear that motor straining you might even hear your chain making popping noises these are the sounds that tell you that you're doing something very wrong so starting out from a stop what you really want to do is be in a bigger cog back here when you come to a stop for example there's a red light up ahead and you slow down you want to make sure that you're downshifting you don't have to go all the way down to first gear generally first gear is useless except for climbing a super high hill but if you drop down into second or third or so when you go to start again your motor is going to be spinning much faster and it's going to be much happier that also means there's going to be less resistance on the motor so it's putting less wear and tear on the gears inside of the motor it's putting less wear and tear on the chain and on the gears of the cogs back here on the rear wheel for the same reason that you wouldn't start a manual transmission car or a motorcycle in fourth or fifth gear you don't want to start your bike up in a higher gear you want to downshift so that you're starting in a low gear and that's just going to make your drive train much happier now as you start to pick up speed that's when you can start up shifting into the higher gears but what you don't want to do is while you're pedaling or while you're using that throttle just start running through the gears all the way up to the top gear some mid-drive e-bikes are going to have gear sensors the better ones will and what that does is it actually cuts power to the motor for a split second while you're shifting but even if you have a gear sensor or especially if you don't have a gear sensor what you want to do is just let off power for a brief second while you're shifting you absolutely want to avoid shifting under load that means while you're pedaling hard or while you're giving it throttle don't simultaneously start shifting through the gears as your chain is hopping from cog to cog if you pull high power either from the throttle or by giving strong pedal assist you could actually do serious damage to your chain or even break it now there are a few ways that you can let off power if you're using throttle you can just let go of the throttle for a split second your chain ring in the front is still going to be spinning for about a second or so after you let off power it's still got that inertia in it so that means right when you let off of the throttle you can give that shift your chain is going to hop over nice and easy and you can get back on the throttle if you're using pedal assist you can just decrease the power of your pedaling real quick or just slow it down a little bit while you're shifting you'll feel the motor let off the power and do the shift while it lets off another option is that you can use your brake levers kind of like a clutch if you've driven a manual transmission car or a motorcycle before you'll know that you push in the clutch then you shift and then you let the clutch out you can kind of do the same thing with the brake levers using the electric cut off you can pull the brake lever just a little bit so that the electrical switch there activates and it cuts power to the motor but don't pull it so much that you actually engage the brake pads you just want to let that cut off engage then you can do your shift while the motor isn't operating because it's had that safety cut off then you just let out the brake lever that little bit that you pulled it in and you're back to a functional operating motor that's a nice way if you don't actually want to let off the throttle you can just sort of use that brake lever with a slight pull like a clutch that takes some practice though so maybe don't start with that method now the last piece of advice i'm going to give you here to make sure that your drivetrain lasts as long as possible is that you want to try to avoid using the highest gears as much as you can now if you're bombing down a hill at 30 miles an hour go for it pop it in highest gear and have some fun but generally around the town cruising there's very little need to use that highest gear that's usually seven eight nine something like that it's your smallest cog on the back here the issue is many people leave it in that gear or they just use it a lot because that's the you know the fun gear that's the fastest one the problem is you've got so much more resistance to the torque in that smallest gear and you really start to wear down those teeth i've seen people with a powerful motor like this wear down that smallest cog in 100 or 150 miles which is nothing i mean these things are designed to last much longer so the difference in speed between the smallest cog and the one above it or even two cogs above it is usually very little we're talking maybe a mile two miles an hour tops so if you can get by with using the second highest skier a lot of the time or even the third highest gear you're gonna maybe double or triple the lifespan of your cogs back here compared to if you were just leaving it in the highest gear all the time and really wearing down the teeth on that little gear i know i'm going back and forth between using the word cog and gear technically these are cogs but everyone thinks of them as gears as do i so just know that call gear back here i'm talking about the same thing now i know this is like sacrilege to a lot of really fast riders that really want to be in that highest gear all the time and want to get that extra speed but trust me it's so much better for your drive train if you just back off a tiny bit you know instead of going 28 miles an hour go 26 and a half or 27 in your second highest gear and your drive train is going to last a lot longer and your motor is going to be a lot happier this is especially true if you're throttling if you're pedal assist riding you know you're giving less power you're helping the motor a bit you're not pulling that same type of you know impulse when you hit that throttle but when you're using the throttle all the time you're putting so much more load on this drivetrain often more than these gears are designed to carry so if you're going to be riding heavy on the throttle really try and steer clear of that highest or second highest gear a lot of the time unless you're going downhill or you're in another sort of low resistance scenario the best advice i can give you is to just listen to your motor you're going to hear the difference between when it's spinning fast and happy and when it's spinning slower and grumbling or you're grinding gears or you hear popping noises anything that doesn't sound good is not good so listen to your motor and it'll tell you when it's happy all right that's all i've got for you today guys i hope you're ready to head out on your mid-drive e-bike and do some better shifting and make sure that that drive train lasts as long as possible last but not least before i go it's time to announce the randomly selected commenter for my last video that'll win a free copy of one of my books and the winning commenter is marcus ulrich so congratulations just let me know which one of my books you'd like you can choose from diy lithium batteries diy solar power the ultimate do-it-yourself e-bike guide or my latest book the electric bike manifesto and anybody else who wants a chance to win one of my books for free all you have to do is put a comment down below and hopefully you'll be the randomly selected commenter at the end of my next video if you don't want to wait that long you can always find my books on amazon alright thanks for watching everybody see you here next time you

Channel: EbikeSchool.com

Views: 408,207

Keywords: electric bicycle, e-bike, ebikeschool.com, ebike school

Id: 9y7nriQNqhg

Length: 8min 22sec (502 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 25 2022