Bike ride April 1 May, 2014
At around 11:30 my wife and I set out for our fist ride on the newly restored Schwinn cruiser bikes. These bikes are fitted with 220W motors and 24V 10Ah batteries, which in lay person speak means fairly weak motors powered by low voltage batteries.
Our expectations for the ride were thus not huge.
Our route took us from Paradise Motors at the bottom of paradise Road in Newlands Cape Town, along Riverside Drive up to Rhodes Drive near Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens and then along the conventional leafy route to Constantia Neck, where we stopped for tea. Probably 90% of this ride was uphill, which was an excellent test of the 24V batteries, which are better suited for riding on fairly flat terrain with only mild uphills.
The ride back to just before Kirstenbosch took around 15 minutes, compared with almost 40 minutes in the opposite direction. This gives some indication of just how much uphill we encountered on the outward leg.
Just before one would normally take the final left turn back to Kirstenbosch, we kept going straight and then headed up into the steep hills of Bishops Court. Every time we came to a junction, we opted to go uphill rather than downhill or level. We rode the Bishops Court hills in this manner, enjoying the beauty of the quiet tree lines roads for twenty to thirty minutes before heading back to our house a couple of blocks from Paradise Motors in Newlands.
At the end of the ride, I still had a bit of battery left, but I'm sure it was pretty close to flat. My wife's battery, on the other hand, still had plenty of charge.
One can put this down to the fact that I weigh around 105 Kgs and she tops the scale at just over half that. There are a number of things that contribute to battery "life" on a ride. These include, inter alia, the amount of uphill (we had lots), the amount the rider pedals (we did quite a bit), whether there is a head or tail wind (we had neither) and the weight of the rider - my motor and battery worked twice as hard as my wife's (my bike was also bigger and heavier than hers).
All in all we must have ridden for around one and a half hours each on a single battery charge. Not bad I think, give the extend of uphill and the steepness of the inclines we rode.
Tomorrow we will take the same bikes on a relatively flat ride to compare the distance and time we are able to achieve.
At around 11:30 my wife and I set out for our fist ride on the newly restored Schwinn cruiser bikes. These bikes are fitted with 220W motors and 24V 10Ah batteries, which in lay person speak means fairly weak motors powered by low voltage batteries.
Our expectations for the ride were thus not huge.
Our route took us from Paradise Motors at the bottom of paradise Road in Newlands Cape Town, along Riverside Drive up to Rhodes Drive near Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens and then along the conventional leafy route to Constantia Neck, where we stopped for tea. Probably 90% of this ride was uphill, which was an excellent test of the 24V batteries, which are better suited for riding on fairly flat terrain with only mild uphills.
The ride back to just before Kirstenbosch took around 15 minutes, compared with almost 40 minutes in the opposite direction. This gives some indication of just how much uphill we encountered on the outward leg.
Just before one would normally take the final left turn back to Kirstenbosch, we kept going straight and then headed up into the steep hills of Bishops Court. Every time we came to a junction, we opted to go uphill rather than downhill or level. We rode the Bishops Court hills in this manner, enjoying the beauty of the quiet tree lines roads for twenty to thirty minutes before heading back to our house a couple of blocks from Paradise Motors in Newlands.
At the end of the ride, I still had a bit of battery left, but I'm sure it was pretty close to flat. My wife's battery, on the other hand, still had plenty of charge.
One can put this down to the fact that I weigh around 105 Kgs and she tops the scale at just over half that. There are a number of things that contribute to battery "life" on a ride. These include, inter alia, the amount of uphill (we had lots), the amount the rider pedals (we did quite a bit), whether there is a head or tail wind (we had neither) and the weight of the rider - my motor and battery worked twice as hard as my wife's (my bike was also bigger and heavier than hers).
All in all we must have ridden for around one and a half hours each on a single battery charge. Not bad I think, give the extend of uphill and the steepness of the inclines we rode.
Tomorrow we will take the same bikes on a relatively flat ride to compare the distance and time we are able to achieve.