byebyepetrol said:
While I replace the rotor in the 350w I thought I'd try the 500w version from Pirez Bikes.
Pirez was great to deal with and fast to ship.
Verdict: don't bother!
IMHO the 350w is fine for commuting. It's more efficient.
The 500w might give you a 5kmh top end gain but the battery consumption is foul.
The 350w promises a comfortable 50km range at Level 3 (out of 5) vs the 500w, which ran out of steam (it cut out)
after 36km at level 3 out of 3.
Admittedly it is cold at the moment in Tassie but the bike is kept in the office at work or the spare room at home all day before the ride home.
The coloured display is blingworthy but the voltage readout is still just a primitive voltmeter with no averaging intelligence. It does have a mini USB which is handy and it has a clock which the Bafang 961 didn't.
The 500w has a strange muted start up and it takes a couple of pedals for it to power up fully. It's a soft-start. The 350w doesn't have this quirk.
The On One forks replaced with Manitou R7s and they're good. 600g weight gain but that's ok.
Hi mate, been a long time, I've finally joined the mid drive brigade and my
old hub drive is still kicking along on my big cruiser.
I'll post another thread on the bikes I've built for myself and my wife but I have a few comments having bought the Cap Rouge 250w and 500w kits.
Do you have a programming cable? It sounds like your Pirez settings are smashing the battery. I wanted to match mine better with my wifes so I dropped the controller current, the controller has a max current of 25 amp and it was set to 22. I dropped it to 20. I set it to use 9 PAS levels, that also improved the ability to match my wifes speed, and I tweaked her controller to 16 amps, it is a 20 amp max.
I read somewhere that setting the current higher than 15 causes an error on some units but not in this case, seems to work fine and apparently the 350w is the same hardware running at 18 amps so I will probably put it to 17 and put the 'keep current' down a little. The 250w stock settings had keep current at 20%, my 500w was 60%, an article I read on programming was reccommending 80% but I think this is a bit much so I will set that back to 60%. The keep current setting will definitely affect the battery, I reckon my wife got a drop of about 20% range with this setting upped.
It's pretty cool here in Canberra now, over our 14.5km commute the 250w motor is barely even warm so it shouldn't cause any issues.
In level 3/4 the 500w is about the same as the 250w in level 8/9, and cosumes about the same amount of battery, sits between 350w and 450w whenon the flat or slight inclines.
