California tries to limit to 250 watt???

[DaveMatthews]

Outside of the regulatory, sufficient power for an ebike depends on multiple factors: fitness of the rider, terrain, road safety, cargo load, and sometimes, damnit, I just want to get to and from work.

Personally, I like a 750w motor that can run 1200+ watts. I recently put a rear Grin All-Axle hubmotor and Phaserunner controller on a 52v bike. It's quite the fast ebike, with a bi-directional throttle for accelerating and braking. The work I do is physical, so it's now my work bike.

Otherwise, I have lately been riding this approaching eighteen year-old ebike:
View attachment 209728
24 volt, 250 watts of slow-speed throttleless front hubmotor fun!

It all depends on what you want or need to do. So I'm keeping a close eye on legislation and/or enforcement.
And this sweet thing might soon get a legal maximum speed limit set via controller:

View attachment 209731

Classic!

 

[Chargeride]

Are we still be confused by the 250w limit?
Its just EU gobblygook that sums up their entire attitude to truth so they can ban this and allow that in the big lawyers book of deception.

We have a 250w limit, but the 1.5kw Avinox is legal.

They'll allow it till the greasing of palms dries up or someone famous gets run over and starts a campaign backed by the right people.

 

[Stefan Mikes]

but the 1.5kw Avinox is legal.

Who said that?

 

[PedalUma]

I contacted my representative. This is what he said:
Agree that the bill is now problematic with the amendments from the Transportation Committee. I have spoken with the author and expressed concerns, and have also requested that my name be removed as a co-author given the changes to the original bill.

 

[PedalUma]

I wanted to tell a mom to download the donor form from the UCSF Transplant Center and have both parents notarize it. Then they can get vouchers to have their 14-year-old's illegal 70 mph motorcycle's brakes worked on for free. Lots of old guys in the Silicon Valley want fresh kidneys, livers, and hearts and are willing to pay.

 

[Chargeride]

Who said that?

The official legislEUation

 

[Chargeride]

After that ride Im having a philisophical crisis.
Our first problem is we remember doing it on motorbikes, and there lays the issue.
The bikes shrunk that entire area to blip..blip, tear it all up.
Start in the town ,in Aberystwth for tea and biscuits.
Exhilerating but far removed from the consequences.
The more power we desire, the smaller the task becomes and Avinox power just means letting the ride become an escalator to the top.
It was very hard, but we made it and the rest of the ride was fantastic, you're in the space at 650W, and the descent felt earned.
The important bit is having equal motor peformance, so youre all sharing the pain.
I actually want range not power, carrying the second battery in the backpack was a cinch, forgot it was there in fact.

 

[PedalUma]

That Avinox looks nice.

 

[6zfshdb]

An idiot riding a 250 watt bike can still do a lot of damage.

 

[Chargeride]

 

[Cycologist]

An idiot riding a 250 watt bike can still do a lot of damage.

Thankfully, my e-bike motor is only 240 watt.

 

[spokewrench]

I've read that 250 watts is a motor manufacturer's rating, certifying that it will produce 250 watts continuously without overheating. It may in fact be able to produce 750 watts continuously without overheating. Rating it at 250 makes it legal in Europe.

That's wrong. The legal specification is that at specified ambient conditions, the motor must reach thermal equilibrium with no more than 250 watts' mechanical output. Thermal equilibrium is defined as a temperature varying by no more than 2 kelvin for an hour.

That sounds like obfuscation. Any steady current will produce thermal equilibrium. If current i will produce 250 watts' output, 1.02 i will produce 255 watts. The motor should reach equilibrium at a temperature rise 4% higher than at 250 watts. Why isn't the temperature rise specified?

I assume the spec was written for a certain temperature rise, and that limit was supposed to keep from burning insulation and weakening magnets. Insulation on modern e-bike motors withstands very high temperatures. Maybe some kinds of magnets withstand heat better than others. In that case, in real life, the motor could sustain more than 250 watts.

How about RPMs? At a given speed, doubling the output to 500 watts would quadruple the heating, but doubling the RPMs would produce 500 watts with no increase in heating. I wish I could read the complete specs for testing a motor for sustained output. I wonder if major manufacturers like Bosch wrote the testing standard to pull the wool over the eyes of lawmakers.

Anyway, output to climb a 5 minute hill can be much higher than sustained output.

 

[Chargeride]

Its a speed limit with some tech speak added for authenticity.
I guess ECO is around 250w on average.

 

[Stefan Mikes]

I guess ECO is around 250w on average.

Your Levo in the default ECO mode has the peak power capped at a little below 200 W (197.5 W). If we assume your motor had max leg amplification of 4x, then your leg power is amplified by ECO 1.4x. You need to input 197.5/1.4 = 141 W to get at that motor power cap. Owned you a Garmin or a Wahoo (or even a very cheap TCD wireless display), Levo would tell you at what leg power you're usually pedalling.

Now, it is not quite true what you assumed. For instance, my Vado SL is capped at only 84 W in the ECO mode, and only TURBO can unleash the full... 240 W