E-BikeKit Helpful Videos

Hi, my name is Jason Kraft. I'm the CEO of Electric Bike Technologies in Pennsylvania and I want to give you some quick tips on safety around your lithium-ion batteries, whether for e-bikes or anything else, these safety tips apply.

We're going to run down a quick list. There's a PDF we're going to provide, probably share a link to that wherever we share this video, you'll be able to take that with you and study that.

Okay safety guidelines for lithium-ion batteries number one. Always follow the manufacturer's instructions, seems pretty simple but read that book no matter what you get, whether it's from Electric Bike Technologies or not. Make sure you're following that manual and all of those safety instructions around proper use, care, charging, and storage of your lithium-ion batteries.

Always plug into lithium-ion battery directly to a wall outlet. This one gets overlooked a lot. No stacking, no putting these into a strip, give it its own outlet, okay. That's the safe way to do it.

Don't use extension cords, don't use power strips. Always charge at room temperature. Lithium-ion batteries like to live the way you like to live, so those temperature are good if you're cold it's cold. Don't charge it if you're hot; it's hot. Don't charge it you want these basically at room temperature. You don't want to charge, a nice cold frozen battery and you don't want to charge a battery that's boiling already.

Always charge your battery in a well-ventilated area with a fire detection system. Okay, this is a battery safety thing. You want to make sure you're charging this somewhere where if gas does escape or something like that, that it's not going to cause a bigger problem.

Always monitor the battery when you're charging. This is kind of interesting for e-bikes because a lot of manufacturers, do recommend a balancing charge once in a while. If you have a battery with multiple cells but for the most part you want to be attentive.

You don't want to leave a battery charging unattended. You don't want to do it overnight while you're sleeping. Those are dangerous situations, you want to make sure that you're able to act if there is a problem.

Occasionally for those balancing recommendations you want to do an extended charge, that's fine but you want to pay attention, do not leave your lithium battery unattended while charging.

Do not stack or cluster lithium-ion batteries. So if you have a bunch of stuff, whether it's an e-bike battery or whether it's a smaller lithium-ion battery, you don't want to stack these things together. You create excessive heat the more you put them together, so don't do that. Let them have fresh air flow.

Do not use the battery or charger if it has been damaged. Okay, if it's been wet, if it's been punctured if it's been dropped. If you dumped your bike, do not do that. If something has been physically damaged, you want to stop, assess the situation. Get some professional help if you need it.

Don't charge that battery, if it's been dented or something like that. Never block your exit from the home while charging your lithium-ion battery. Again fire safety stuff, they want to make sure you can get out of the room if something goes wrong. So make sure you have an exit plan.

You never try to modify or service your e-bike or trike battery system. You don't want to do that you're not a professional. You didn't design these. Don't get in there messing around. That is one sure way to cause a problem. Get professional help, if you need to service your batteries. Don't try to do that yourself.

Never use a battery if it shows signs of physical damage. Again it's just so important that if you drop your battery or if you crack your charger or anything like that, you do not want to use those products. So, when you get them tested out, make sure they're good before you use them, or you want to replace them.

Never place lithium-ion batteries in the trash, recycling bin. This is very important this environmental aspect of all this. We're putting a lot of batteries out there, these large lithium-ion batteries you don't want to just throw these in the trash. You need to contact your local Waste Management Service company, or you can look online there are companies that specialize in the disposal of lithium-ion batteries.

We want to do that right. We have a great industry. It's a fun industry, electric bikes. We don't want to mess this up, we don't want to mess our planet up, we don't want to mess ourselves up. So do the right thing and dispose of your batteries properly.

I hope these tips are helpful, hope you find it useful. Again this is a general outline for battery safety when it comes to lithium-ion batteries, we all need to take care.

I hope this helps you have a good day.

This video is an overview and an introduction to the latest model of the E-BikeKit display from Electric Bike Technologies. This display is new and introduced and available in August 2020 and it's also retro compatible back to the 2017 or previous models of the E-BikeKit display.

So, if you have a previous model, this model will actually serve as a replacement and upgrade to that display. We're going to walk through each of the functions, starting with the power on and off button, and work our way through all the menu settings to give you an overview of this display. So, we're going to jump right in here and we're going to turn the system off. You do that with the push pad, so on the left, you'll see the push pad. The push pad has a plus, a minus, a light icon, an eye icon, and then it also has the on and off icon.

So, we're going to start by holding down on and off and that's going to turn the system off pretty standard stuff. We're going to press that with a quick press to get the system back on and you'll see the Electric Bike Technologies logo flash on the screen. Now, I'm going to go through each one of these here on the screen and show you what they do. I just hit the light button, so we can get the luminance up. There is an automatic sensor down here in this corner, that is sensing daylight or dusk and it will change the screen automatically. This light you can press at any time to do that manually as well. The E-BikeKit does not have a headlight option, so this is not for a headlight, you'll use it for the luminance changes. So, we have up here, we have the battery indicator right now showing 40% on the battery that's hooked up. We have the miles per hour here, and that would obviously change as you're riding around, and we have power. This here in this bottom, this on the power is actually going to show you current and a bar would show here as well when this is in use. We have trip over here on the left in the middle we have 0 through 5 and that's your power setting. Then we have the ODO which is the odometer and the total miles on the display which is 0 for this new one.

So, we'll go back to the push pad, and obviously one of the most important things we have here is how do you get into the settings. You have the plus and minus button you're going to hold those two down simultaneously for 2 seconds and that's going to get us into the user setting menu. The user setting menu is a series of settings and the way that you navigate this menu is you use the plus and minus to go through them and then to make your selection once you're on the setting that you want to change, you're going to use the "i" button right here. So, this "i" button on the push pad, if I push that, that's going to bring us over here and now you're going to use the plus and minus to make that change and this one the first one happens to be the Units which are Imperial, a USA or Metric for somebody outside of the US and UK and you're going to change the speed limit the wheel says you can actually see those changes you do that. So, for most of you, it's going to be in the United States and it's going to be Imperial of course. So, once you have the setting that you want, you're going to use the "i" button to select and then the focus is going to jump back to the setting and you're going to be able to use the plus and minus to navigate, you'll use the minus, in this case, to navigate down to Speed Limit. Now, the speed limit right now by default is going to be 20 miles per hour, that's how they're shipped. So, to make a change here, you're, going to again "i" button and then plus or minus. Now, this will go all the way up to a speed of 31 mph, that's not necessarily how fast your bike's going to go. How fast the top speed on your bike is ultimately going to be determined by the motor type, geared, or direct-drive it's going to be determined by that plus the outside diameter of the wheel or the wheel size and it's going to be determined by the voltage of your battery, in this case, it would be 36 volts or 48 volts which this LCD is compatible for. So, if you put it up to 31 it's going to go it's going to max out for your combination of your system and wheel size and battery type, not necessarily going 31 mph. So, again this will be set at 20, and depending on those factors, your wheel size, your battery voltage, and where you put your settings, some of our systems will go a top speed of 20 mph and some of our systems will go a top speed of 26 mph at the very, very highest end. So, we're going to put this down to 20 and again, if you wanted to limit this on the other side of that, if you wanted to limit this down, you can actually take this down to whatever it is if you had somebody riding the bike and you wanted it to top out at a certain speed, you can limit the top speed with this setting. So, I'm going to put this back to 20. I'm going to hit "i" and I'm going to move to the next one which is Wheel Size. I will hit "i" to get over there and we'll see by default it's 26 which would be the most common wheel size and it will go all the way down to 17. So, 16 is the smallest we have 16, 20, 24-inch, 26-inch, and 700c those are the options for your wheel sizes and it's important that you get it right because this will determine your mph calculation on the front end of this LCD. So, I'm going to put that back to 26, I will press "i" and then I will move to the next setting which is Motor Type. Now motor type, E-BikeKit sells two types of motors, one of them is a fat motor but essentially 2 types of motors 500 watts geared that's the default on this LCD, and that is what we call performance. So, that is a smaller diameter performance geared motor and that's 500 watt nominal motor. We're going to click the "i" to get on this setting and I'll show you that there are only two options here, it's 500 watts geared, and the other setting is going to be 500 watt direct-drive. We call that heavy-duty (HD) and that's the larger diameter, shiny motor that we have with the logo on the side cover, hopefully you know which motor you have, again important that you program this the right way. So, we'll click geared motor I'm going to hit "i" to go back, and we'll go to the next setting which is Battery. Battery in this case 48 volt lithium-ion is the default. That's the most common battery that people use with an E-BikeKit. So, we'll click "i" and get over to the options, and I'll scroll through we're going to go down here, we'll start with the, we'll go down, and it's DIY. DIY is a much more complicated setting. It's the most complicated, many people are not going to use it, so it's very rare that you would use this, but if I click on DIY, you can see a menu of the 5 settings. These 5 settings are actually going to be the 2 increments from full to empty and they're going to be different voltages and if you know the discharge curve of your battery, then you would actually be able to come in here and change some of these settings that would have an effect on the front-end battery indicator. So, it's a custom option that we allow you to go in here and make your own custom options on the battery discharge curve if you have that information. Most people do not and again this is going to be very rare, so I'm going to get out of that I'm going to go back to the settings and show you what's next there is a 36 volt SLA which is sealed lead acid. Many people don't use this, but some people still use this and so we left it in. We have customers in the past that use this, so we left that in there 3 volt SLA, 48 volt SLA, 36 volt lithium-ion, and 48 volt lithium-ion. Most people after 2020 it's going to be a 48 volt lithium-ion, okay. So, I'm going to press "i" to get back, and we'll go to the next setting, which is the Current Limit. Now, the E-BikeKit has a 20 amp controller and that's pretty standard for legal e-bikes in the United States and so 20 amp is where it ships now. If I click on this, I cannot go anywhere past 20 amps, but I can go lower and what this would do is ultimately, it would lower the amps allowed to pass through the system and basically overall as it's a power setting and you could pretty much blanket, bring down the ultimate power of the entire system by bringing this down. So, 99% of you, you don't want to play with this 20 amp is where it should be in some examples where you really wanted to reduce power overall for everything else, you could limit the amount of current that would go into the controller and ultimately that's kind of a blanket power setting across the board. So for 99%, leave this at 20. I'm going to click the "i" and get back I'm going to go through the next one, which is the Pedal-Assist setting, and this gets a little bit more complicated, but I'm going to click "i" to get in here now. Here we have 3 settings, we have PAS Delay, the PAS Delay is how many times, how many magnets pass on the crank sensor and the crank disc with magnets in it. It's how many magnets are going to pass until the pedal-assist actuates or kicks in, but then we have the PAS Power, and that's by default that's 3, power is going to be 5 and pedal-assist sensitivity is going to be 12 out of the box. I recommend you don't change these initially, but you can get in there and start to play with them very easily and find out and really fine-tune the pedal-assist on this system, which is it's a great feature, but it's going to take some tinkering on your part to find what's best for you. We've put in what's most universal for most people and a lot of people you don't have to get in here and change this, but Pedal-Assist Delay is one that's how quickly the system will kick in based on your cadence and how fast (oh, it kick me out of settings) I'm going to up and down plus and minus together to get back in. Again, go down to PAS, and press "i" so we just timed out there, so I'm going to leave the delay where it is I'm going to go down to PAS Power now. This is really like the torque of, and how quickly once that pedal-assist kicks in how much it gets up to help you out right to assist with your pedaling so you have the power, and then you have the pas sensitivity, and this is also a bit of a power setting, and it's so we have the pedal-assist power in the middle which is kind of like torque, and then the pedal-assist sensitivity is ultimately a larger kind of blanket power setting, and again you can play with each one of these and get the feel and really fine tune to your riding situation and how you want your pedal-assist to go between all these numbers and the power setting on the front of this LCD. There's a lot you can do here, there are a lot of nuances, and you can really dial this LCD in which is a great feature. So, I'm going to get out of here I'm going to use back and "i" and I'm going to get to the next setting now, this next setting says Drive right here. Now the drive setting and its default is P/T Override and what that means is pedal-assist is always on, and then you have throttled the "T" override. So, when you're riding you're going to have pedal-assist, and that's going to be on it's going to be looking at your pedal-assist settings and your power setting from the front, but anytime you grab the throttle this setting here, this drive mode means pedal-assist, you grab the throttle you actuate that, and that's going to take over, so it's going to override the pedal-assist. So, if you had pedal-assist on, you're going along, and you have a situation where you need to just go, you're going to grab that throttle and actuate and go, and it's the throttle is always going to pay attention to it's always going to be full power, okay. So, you grab the throttle, it's full power over the pedal-assist no matter what level or other settings you're on. Now I'm going to click "i" to get into there, and I'm going to click the minus, and that's going to take me, and that's going to say throttle only. Obviously, if it's throttle only, the throttle will work, and the pedal-assist will be not responsive and then pedal-assist only. So, you can choose those pedal-assist only or throttle only from this feature right here. Also physically, if you did not connect one or the other, it would be by default one or the other. I hope that makes sense, so I'm going to put this back to pedal-assist with throttle override and move on. I will click "i" and get back down here to LCD Luminance this should be obvious. You know I will click "i" and show you that we can make it darker hopefully, you can see that, and then we'll go all the way back up to 100% click "i" and get back. Now finally, we hit minus we go to Trip Reset and we can click yes when we hit "i" it will say cleared, and that's how you clear your trip.

So, we'll go down to back, and we'll click "i" and that's going to get us back to the main screen. So, I hope that makes sense now, what we haven't talked about here is most obvious. Now, if you have the plus and the minus here, I want you to think about this one, we'll go down hit minus to 0 okay, and then it's 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. These are top levels of power, okay, and I want you to think about this as 20, 40, 60, 80, 100% of power okay, and so when you need to go you can do this on the fly you can do it when you're standing still it doesn't matter but you're going to use the plus and minus when you're riding, and you want to access power to go through 0 through 5, okay and 5 would be the highest and again, I want to reiterate something in this with this LCD. If you have it in, let's say 3, and you're in pedal-assist with throttle override, your pedal-assist is going to be paying attention to this overall 3, okay, but it's also when you grab the throttle, it's always going to be full power it's not going to pay attention to this, and that's kind of an upgrade and a new feature for this LCD.

Okay at this time I'm going to tell you just a couple of more things here what's different about this I think I've already mentioned that this is retro compatible with the 2017 or you know the previous model of this LCD, which was a black and white LCD. You can upgrade and use this LCD in its place if you need to get a replacement okay. The plugs are the same the settings are all correlated, so it is retro compatible that's a big deal. Another thing that differs between this model and the new model, and the 2017 or previous model is that this has a memory. So, if I cycle, will you see the 3 here in the previous model this will go back to 0 but when I cycle on and off in this situation, it does remember the 3, so we have added that feature so if you're a person who likes to ride in 3, 4, 5 whatever it may be it's going to come back on where you left off and lastly I'm going to show you, on the side of this, you do have the USB port. This is a standard USB port, and that's a 5 volt, so you can charge your mobile devices off of that port.

So, that is the latest model LCD for the E-BikeKit conversion system from Electric Bike Technologies, I hope you find it useful. If you have any questions whatsoever call our toll-free number, 866-882-3245, or click contact on this site and use the form to get in touch with us, and we'll take care of you. Thank you.

[E-BikeKit Intro Music]

This is Jason from Electric Bike Technologies, and this video is to deal specifically with folks that may be having a problem with their pedal-assist sensor, or they think they are.

The first thing about a pedal-assist sensor, it's got to be installed correctly, it's got to be installed perpendicular and we have another video that'll be right next to this one, that shows you how to do that and you would have to be seeing the red light, blink to know that everything is good and that it's actually picking up the signal. The second part of pedal-assist problems and potentially is the program on the LCD. A lot of times, well people who didn't program their LCD at all and they think they have pedal-assist problems.

So, I want to get into the LCD, I want to get right to the pedal-assist settings, and these are what I want you to check. On this page or nearby, we have another video that walks through, every setting on the LCD so you can watch that as well, if you still have issues but this one is specific to pedal-assist not seeming like its functioning, even though you have a red blinking light. Let's get into the settings, I'm going to show you how to check it out. And what we're going to do is take them all back to the defaults, okay.

So, we have our LCD here this is our Nokee model from 2017 through 2020. We're going to turn it on by pressing that "M" right there, quick press it, it comes on. We can hold the up arrow to get a backlight if we need a little bit of illumination. You can see here, this is a brand new LCD, we're going to get into the settings. We're going to go right to the pedal-assist settings. So, I'm going to get into the settings, I'm going to hold down the up and down arrow together simultaneously together, a couple of seconds and that gets us into the settings menu.

This is St 1 or setting one and we're going to cycle through using this "M" button on the side, okay. So, we're going to go click "M". We have St 2 (then press "M" for), St 3 (then press "M" for), St 4 (then press "M" for), St 5, quick presses on the "M", St 6, St 7, St 8 is where we want to be, all right. So, St 8 P1–03, this is our startup delay and I want you to put this to 5 for default and then get to the next setting we're going to click "M" quick press we're going to get to P2–5, which is the default, I want that on 5. We're going to click "M" again and we get the P3-25. Here's what I want you to make a change, I want you to take this down to 7. No matter what you had it on, I want you to take it to 7, and then you're going to click "M" again. When you click "M" again it's going to take you to the next setting St 9. So, the pedal-assist has been set up, right back to the default, okay. So, those defaults are going to be P1 is going to be 5, the second setting is going to be 5 and the third is going to be 7, just like I showed you. Now at this point, we're going to turn it off. We're going to hold the "M" button down, for a couple seconds and that's going to get back to the main screen. We're going to hold it down again for a couple of seconds, to save our settings by cycling off, and then we can press it again, quick press, and it will come back on. At this point, I want you to go try again with your pedal-assist, see if it's being responsive now that you have set the defaults. This is one of the troubleshooting steps we have. If you call us and tell us that your pedal-assist sensor is not working. So first, you ensure there's a red light going, then you come back, and you do this, try it out.

Now after you've done that, if you want to play around with the settings and try to make it's more responsive based on what you have in the book. If you want to play around with those St 8 settings for pedal-assist, you can go ahead into your book. You can read that, and you can try some things, but right now to make sure a pedal-assist is working, this is what, I want you to do.

[E-BikeKit Intro Music]

Hey Jason, here from Electric Bike Tech and I want to talk about E-BikeKit hub motors today. I want to basically just give you the difference between both show you a little bit of the insides and maybe you'll get a better understanding of which one's going to work best for your application.

So, we offer two motor types one is a geared motor that's what people call it and the other one is a direct-drive motor. For simplicity on the website, you're going to see them listed as performance which is geared motor and then you're going to see heavy-duty which is the larger, direct-drive motor.

Performance comes in 5 sizes, you've got 700c, 26, 24, 20, and 16-inch because it has a smaller diameter, we can do that. The larger one, the direct-drive or the heavy-duty that's going to be 26, 24, and 20 would be the smallest you can build with that. Now why would you choose one over the other and the main reason you would choose one over the other, would be weight. How much total load is going on the bike or trike that you're building? Also is it a bike or trike? So, what I mean by that is, the geared performance anything over 250 pounds forget about it. Under 250 pounds you're probably going to choose a performance geared motor. Over 250 pounds you're going to go with the heavy-duty in the direct-drive motor, okay because those are more durable and I'm going to show you why by taking a look inside each one of these.

Here I have the insides of a geared motor. The insides of a geared motor and why it's called a geared motor is because you have a clutch, and you have these 3 nylon cogs. Now these cogs will fit into the shell of the motor and that's what's going to actuate your wheel. This means that there's friction inside of here this means that it can build up heat under pressure say over 250 pounds and with enough pressure you could actually break the teeth. So, this is why it's important that you go by total load over under 250 pounds okay. This goes in here, turns to much load on there you may have problems otherwise anyone under 250 pounds this is performance because it's a little bit more torque and it's got a higher top speed. So, that's performance geared. So, direct-drive what are the inside look on like on a direct-drive? Well, this one's already inside and this we have a stator and then we have the outer shell there and what happens is you have 2 sets of rare earth magnets. They never touch when you electrify them, they go one way or the other. That's one of the reasons why we can do reverse on this as well.

So, a direct-drive motor is a bit heavier you have the larger diameter so less stealth but it's super durable. So, you can do 250 pounds you can do up to 600 pounds kind of against this and I'm not saying that that's going to be able to pull 600 pounds by itself, but it's not going to break because there's nothing to break. It's only a magnetic field and that's how this works. So, direct-drive you're going to go anything over 250 total pounds is going to be direct-drive also if it's an upright trike or it's the E-TrikeKit, which is made specifically for upright tricycles it's going to be a direct-drive because you can actuate reverse on the direct-drive you can't do that without with a geared motor.

So, I hope that explains some of the differences and gives you an inside look, I know it's brief if you have other questions, you'll let us know but those are how you would choose your motor under 250 pounds, geared over 250 pounds total load, you're going with the right drive.

[E-BikeKit Intro Music]

Hi Jason, here from Electric Bike Technologies. I want to talk to you a little bit about wattage. We get the question here, at E-BikeKit a lot, about watts. People email us, they call, and they ask are these a thousand watts? They see that a lot on the internet, it's very pervasive, one thousand watts. So, I'm here to clear things up a little bit, I know others have done videos similar this is for E-BikeKit.com.

We have 500 watt motors, these here are actually, what's called direct-drive motors, that's another video to explain that. This is called a geared motor but they're both 500 watts and what that means is, that they will run cool, forever at 500 watts, okay. That's not exactly what they can take though. They can certainly take 1,000 watts going through them.

Now here's where watts come from. Watts the actual formula for watts is going to be Amps that's "amperage allowed" by the controller in this case it's 20. It's twenty amps with the E-BikeKit controller. So, it's the amps allowed by the controller, in this case 20 multiplied by the voltage of the battery that you use.

Now E-BikeKit can be used at 36 or 48 volts but now we only offer 48 volts. Long story there, but 48 volts times 20 amps, from our controller, is going to yield 960 peak watts of power. So, you're close to that 1,000 watts of power that you want and that's fine to run through these 500 watt motors. Now 500 watts is nominal, that's the phrase that they use, where it's rated at 500 watts. So, it's 500 watt nominal and that's how we put it on the website as well. We say 500 to 1000 with 48 volt battery, that is how we're coming to that number and that is peaks.

So, we quote nominal, this is a real honest way to do it we quote nominal 500 watt with the peaks of 1,000 because 1,000 is what you get when you run a 48 volt battery through a controller, that will allow for 20 amps, for really 960 to be exact, so, that's how watts work. if anyone tells you, they've got a 1,000 watt motor, it's most likely that it's false advertising. I mean you know; they may be giving you a 1,000 watts peak because they're giving you a 48 volt battery and they're giving you a 500 watt motor and they're giving you a controller with 20 or maybe even 22 amps allowable and that's why they're quoting you that, but what they're really quoting you is the peak.

So, I hope this video helps you to understand that you know 500 watt nominal, 1,000 watt peaks, they're seeing comparable and all they're telling you is 1,000, it's likely a 500 watt motor and they're quoting you the peak wattage output of that motor, a bit of false advertising. We don't do it that way, so I hope that clears it up, by the way, if you had a real 1,000 watt nominal motor, it would be about twice as heavy as this. It would have much bigger magnets inside and it would not be, not be super-efficient for most e-bike applications. So, anyway 500 nominal 1,000 watt peaks, amps times voltage equals wattage. Now you know if you have any questions let us know.