Repacking a Turbo battery
- Thread starter bazzapage
- Start date
Jan Hermanson
Member
would be interesting to know indeed. It would be equally interesting to know if someone has experienced any significant degradation such that repacking would be useful. Given that Specialized promises 700 full cycles (on the Turbo series) before recommended replacement I suspect few have reached that limit. I suspect that the Turbo series, with all brain mashed into the battery, may be more challenging for a third party to repack than other "brainless" batteries. With the expected life range of the battery - you might want a new bike even before the battery dies.
eagamer80
Active Member
As the world moves toward trying to make as less impact as possible to the environment and things more repairable, despite (yet) the opposition of many governments and companies, I think there will be some day, I hope, a way to replace the batteries of your bikes as changing the batteries of a remote control toy. Or at least that would be nice don't you think?. Imagine yourself replacing rechargable batteries of your bike. Is not fair that you pay more than 1000 dollars for a battery and when you dispose your old one, you get nothing back from the recycled materials you're giving to who knows what company. I did a quick research on Google the other day, and I saw a few companies already refurbishing old e-bike batteries. I think in the future this will be more and more common, but yet I have no experience on this and I do not know which company of this sort could be entrusted to repair a Specialized Turbo battery. The problem of the Turbo battery is that is not only a battery, but the brain of the bike. I am not sure if 3rd party companies would risk reparing such a thing. I am afraid we're balls-tied to Specialized on this one.
Yeah, there's still much we don't know about each company's battery design since each has chosen different methods of battery management. I hope we don't see any practices of planned obsolescence in the battery that would prohibit a later replacement of the individual cells by a third party. But we do live in a litigious world. I remember being ticked off several years ago when I learned my inkjet printer had the replaceable cartridges that could not be refilled by the user because the on-board chipset would render it 'dead' for life if it ever got below a certain point.
John E
New Member
I tried...... And failed. Inside the battery, they have 4 or 5 modules interconnected with pre-manufactured zinc metal plates. These are spot welded together meaning it is difficult to separate each module.
Personally, I think they have purposely made if difficulty to ensure battery's are purchased from Specialized (and they make a further profit)
Incidentally, it took around 50 cells if I recall costing around £200
Personally, I think they have purposely made if difficulty to ensure battery's are purchased from Specialized (and they make a further profit)
Incidentally, it took around 50 cells if I recall costing around £200
Jan Hermanson
Member
John E o you have any pictures from the internals of the battery?
eagamer80
Active Member
Considering the battery unavailability in the future (and the no possibility of refurbish an official one) I wonder how hard could be to convert the "old" Turbo to a standard electric bike by aquiring a new motor and battery and adapt it to the Turbo frame. May be one day....
bazzapage
Active Member
Let's hope that GoSwiss survives. I imagine all the electronics are provided by them.
Hope this isn’t a derail, but on the topic of repacking turbo batteries... (but in this case, Turbo Vado): I talked to a seemingly well-informed LBS salespers9n a couple months back, who told me a number of interesting th8ngs about the Vado, most of which have subsequently turned out to be accurate. Anyway, he enthused about the new battery design and even said that users would be able to repack the batteries with higher capacity cels when they become available. I took this with a mountain of salt, but then stumbled across this video (
) which I suspect is where he was getting his information. It does seem to imply something like the ability to repack batteries, tho it doesn’t explicitly say that this would be something users could do. The video’s quite long ( 35 minutes) but I’d be eager to hear what others thought it was promising.
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