Ron's Electric Bike Page

Created Jan 19, 2008

I am an electrical engineer by training I have always been into electric RC cars, so when I found an electric bike kit advertised by www.itselectric.ca (in my hometown of Calgary, now www.powerinmotion.ca) I jumped at it.

I purchased a Wilderness Electric BL-36 Brushless hub motor kit and put it on my 8 year old mountain bike.
I have been riding it to work regularily since 2004 and have saved a pile of money in gas and wear and tear on my vehicle.
In 2006 I damaged up my old lead acid batteries by forgetting to recharge them one night. Those things are really easy to damage. So I went to PowerInMotion and picked up a 36V 9Ah NiCd battery pack and charger. NiCd's last way longer (2 times longer in my experience) than MiMH and cost 33% less back then. They also can handle a lot of abuse.

2007 was my best year so far, and I rode to work 82 times!

I have a roughly 9 km trip one-way, so I don't even need to pedal on days I am tired.
The really amazing part is that I can get home faster on my bike than with my car because of the rush hour traffic. My bike trip is always about 15 minutes, but the car trip can vary from 10 minutes to 50 minutes in rush hour. It's awsome!!!

Since 2004 I put on enough clicks that my old bike literally fell apart. That last few months of it's life I was riding without a working front derailer or rear brakes! I decided to replace it with a really nice bike, but I was annoyed by how much the local bike shops wanted for a decent bike these days, and I could not find a rear hub motor kit (either out of stock everywhere in Canada, or very bad price). So I bought a $99 mountain bike (made in Canada!) from Canadian tire and installed my existing front wheel kit.
I have ridden 32 times to work on this bike and have been very happy with it.

Here is a picture of my old bike:

This is my new bike with a studded front tire for winter riding and two 1 Watt LED bike lights from MEC:

My studded tires cost about $50 and tend to last about 2 seasons.
So this ends up being a very cheap method of transportation!

Winter riding can be very cold, but I found a very unique heat exchanger mask at Wholesale Sports that works amazingly well ($50 at www.psolar.com). Even at 16 degrees below it feels like I am still inside a house, my lungs love it! I also wear insulated winter pants, without these the wind chill will freeze you solid in about 5 minutes.

Well, that is all I have to say about that...

2008-11-10 It has been a long time and I have put many many miles on. My new job doubled the distance for my commute to 20km one way (about 1 hour to 45 minutes depending on wind). The old kit would rarely have enough juice to get me there, so I upgraded to a 48V 11ah lithium phosphate pack with a 40km range. Only problem is that the old motor and controller would not work properly with it. Controller kept shutting down every half wheel rotation. So I ended up buying the demo bike from PowerInMotion, a complete new system with a rear Crystalyte Cannon motor and instant start controller. Nothing too fancy, but it sure was a step up from the old bike, front suspension is very nice!

I have put about 17 trips on it so far, not as many as I would like, but it has been great. In the summer I can get home faster on my bike than with my vehicle!