You said if you wanted to work your butt off on hills, you'd ride an acoustic. Weren't you wondering if the Ago T would take you up hills more easily than your current bike? Yes. Otherwise, why would you want it? There are several considerations.
You asked which would pedal up a hill more easily, but you pedaled as hard as possible to compare the bikes. It seems your question was not what would take you up a hill more easily but what would go faster. I often climb at 8 mph, rather than work my butt off or depend on PAS.
Well. Sorry for the misunderstanding. So I'll try to be as thorough as possible in laying out the situation.
Of course I pedaled both as hard as possible
for comparison. And the R1Up was easier on the legs because I reached the top of the hill in less than half the time. Do I have to also mention that I additionally tried the hill with my R1Up at a slower speed and lower gear, which
of course was easier on the legs, too? Because
obviously, pedaling at slower speeds and lower gears
is easier than pedaling at higher speeds and in higher gears. I didn't think I needed to spell that out. Instead I tried to give the
apples-to-apples comparison as best I could.
With the Tenways on that biggest hill, I has shifted into the lowest gear setting on the Enviolo and I still needed plenty of leg push to slowly chug up that incline. Using roughly the same leg force with the LMTD, I only had to drop as low as 5th gear. And pedal that hard for about half the time duration. But 2nd gear worked fine also, with less vigorous leg input.
You made it sound as if I were dissatisfied with the power provided by my current ebike. I'm not really dissatisfied in that way. But there are other factors. I knew that a hub motor would never make it up a climb as long as the one I'd been contemplating (the motor would most likely overheat partway up Mount Cadillac). Additionally, I miss the 'flat foot', crank-forward design of my acoustic Trek Pure Sport and have been thinking that maybe a mid-drive Bosch on an Electra Townie (like an 8d or 8i) might suit me better. But after trying the Tenways, I am inclined to think that the measly 40nm of the Bosch Active Line motor would feel entirely unsatisfactory... unless, maybe if Bosch has some magic pixie dust in their mid drives that makes them seem more powerful than a 80nm Bafang.
To my mind, buying an ebike that is
less assistant in hill-climbing than what I now have would seem like a step backward.
Now you might be wondering: why didn't this guy explain all of that to begin with?
The answer is: I know better than to introduce extraneous information which might cause people to veer off-topic rather than address the specific question I posed. I've seen it happen all the time on forums. A person asks X and explains that he's thinking about buying Y; the next four responders argue the merits of Y and never address X!
