How To Maintain a Electric Bicycle?

Question

I had purchase an electric bicycle - Meraki from Ninety one cycles. It's very convenient and easy to use, but I still don't know how to do maintenance of my electric bicycle at home.

Answer 1

It is mostly same as an ordinary bicycle and requires more or less the same maintenance (tires, brakes, chain, lights, etc same as usual). But E-bikes are often used more, bad weather including, and the engine puts more stress on everything, so it wears faster and you need more attention to keep it in shape.

The battery does not require any special maintenance, just keep it charged.

Repair shops offer yearly checks that manuals of E-bikes often recommend, but these shops are ready to do the similar check for any bicycle you bring in, and somebody who knows well how to maintain the ordinary bicycle probably can get without.

Answer 2

A lot of the maintenance items on any e-bike are identical to a non-motor assisted bike. At home, I'd recommend wiping your chain with a rag after every ride, and relubricating it weekly. An on-bike chain cleaner like this one (NB: link is to Park Tools, but other companies make these) is worth considering and relatively convenient. You could clean your chain with this maybe monthly, maybe less, but more is better (albeit not every day).

Most bike lubricants will do. Some companies are making e-bike-specific lubricant. To my highly limited knowledge, these may be unnecessary, but a properly designed e-bike lubricant may use a different oil composition than a general purpose bike lubricant, because e-bike chains are under higher tension.

You should inflate your bike tires, probably weekly. Air leaks out from the tubes. This is unavoidable - we could probably make less permeable tires and tubes, but they would have much higher rolling resistance, and even battery-assisted humans have a much lower power to weight ratio than even electric cars. Finding a good air pressure will take some trial and error. You don't need to use the maximum on the sidewall of the tire, and it will be less comfortable and may slow you down if you do. There isn't a hard and fast guide to this. Here is one tire pressure calculator I use. However, Silca, the originator of the calculator, calibrated the data on professional road cyclists, and they are lighter (and more powerful) than the average adult human. In particular, I don't know how well the data extrapolate to much heavier e-bikes. Nevertheless, it's a starting point.

In addition, you may want to get a chain wear gauge, like this one, which lets you check chain wear at home. You could otherwise ask your bike shop, probably yearly. Ideally, you should replace your chain well before it starts to wear out the cassette (the gears in the back) - if it is replaced regularly, you can get several chains to one cassette, but past a certain amount of chain wear, it will also wear out the cassette.

Items to be done regularly include replacing the brake and shift cables and housing, and suspension maintenance. The former is an item that many people neglect, but it does keep your bike operating much more smoothly. If you think your shifting feels poor, you are overdue for a cable change. I don't know exactly what service interval to expect because we don't know how much you're riding and how good the cables are. Some serious road cyclists get theirs changed yearly. I change mine after 2-3 years, but I do use fairly high quality stuff and I can tolerate a bit more deterioration in my shifting. The suspension fork does need occasional overhauls, or else it will break entirely. This is the downside of front suspension. People on this site often recommend that people consider bikes without it instead, because most riders can actually do without it. You get a lot of suspension from your tires, and indeed you can ride fairly rocky gravel without any suspension. But you have what you have now.

Your battery doesn't require mechanical maintenance, but there are steps you can take to prolong its life. Rechargeable batteries, like all complex mechanical objects, do wear out eventually. If you're going to be off the bike for a prolonged period, do discharge it to about 50% before storing it, and don't store it in a place that's too hot. Indoors in a garage should be fine. If you're in a cold climate, don't recharge it if the battery temperature is under the freezing point. If possible, avoid discharging it below 25%.

Also, if you really want to maximize life, you can try to minimize the amount of time it spends at full charge. Most people don't know this, but deep discharges and being in a full charge state for too long are more stressful for the battery. Your battery may have smart battery management software that adapts to your schedule, so it will partly charge the battery as you plug it in overnight and not go to full charge until a set time (this has been implemented on Apple iPhones and iPads, for example, but I don't know how widespread this feature is on ebikes). This isn't something to worry too much about if you can't pull it off, however.