EDIT: WTF was I thinking going so long on this? I'm waiting for my bike to charge up from yesterday so I can make a Costco run.
Or they aren't really Samsung batteries and have just been skinned with labels that say Samsung on them. This is unfortunately a relatively common practice. You can reduce your likelihood of becoming a victim of it by doing business only with vendors you know. I personally got hosed on this problem when it turned out a vendor I thought was trustworthy was in fact outsourcing her battery production to a Far East manufacturer with an already dodgy reputation. My pack with what were supposed to be Samsung 25R cells ended up losing capacity way too fast and an inspection showed they weren't the cells they were labeled as.
This link is not the be-all and end-all of spotting fake cells. But if you're not into this scene, I bet it will be surprising to see how far sellers go to disguise fakes. Its not even a seller. Its a whole manufacturing channel. Stuff like this can really only happen on an assembly line. Coincidentally this article shows fake 25R's. The kind of detective work described here is WAY more than even an informed consumer can be expected to go (plus much of the detective work only works on cells
before they go into a pack), so to me articles like this just re-emphasize how important it is to do business only with a vendor who has a secure supply chain and is accountable after the fact.
and the Google search for more:
I started out that way myself. You have to remember to keep your packs charged up for your needs, and of course its bad for a Li-NMC pack to be charged up and left to sit, so you have to think a lot harder in advance closer to your departure about what your needs will be. If your needs change mid-ride, you've got more thinking to do, or you just have to say no to whatever opportunity arose.
Plus, you lose overall capacity by splitting the pack up into parts because you can't drain them all down as easily as a single pack. Paralleling them together eliminates most of this issue, but then you have introduced a safety factor that you have to account for. Paralleling packs into a single virtual one is where I went after using multiple packs, and that worked fine, but to do it safely I needed to ensure pack quality by matching the cells in each pack, and matching the pack capacities, and the charge cycle count so they wore down equally. Battery blenders are going to deal with much of these needs... provided you trust the little black box that is the battery blender which again brings you to only dealing with a trusted, accountable vendor.
As to tailoring the battery to the ride, I found that to be a concern that is only true on paper. You trade something you have to think about and plan for - a multi-step process - into a plug-in-and-forget-it brainless process that is single-step. As to the added weight, that is nothing. We have motors that far exceed anything that matters, unless we're doing an emtb and then yes you want a small battery, but thats a whole different league and arguably a bike like this has no business on bicycle singletrack trails (there are for sure exceptions to this,
@DieselTech).
Is the world going to end, then, doing it this way? Hopefully not but you are increasing your risk factor and you should go into this decision without having rose-colored glasses on. There are very real risks to your wallet from being scammed and to charge safety.
Does he? He certainly reviews them, but I've never seen him do a deep dive where he addresses the issues I'm talking about. I'd like to see him do that if possible. Again I need to emphasize strongly that I'm not against things like paralleling packs per se. I'm against doing it when you are buying from a class of vendor who is totally unaccountable to you after the sale, via a channel that is known to have some serious pitfalls that the consumer has to navigate after doing a fair bit of due diligence... the kind of diligence that is almost impossible to do at all when trying to verify the veracity of something assembled on another continent.
And therein lies the rub.
I have been reading and watching people write up their mistakes and bad experiences for enough years to know what paths lead to a much more likely possibility of a bad outcome. And just about everyone here reading this thread (who doesn't have ego wrapped up in the argument) knows as well. You have a high-cost product sold cheap. By a company on another continent, with no real direct form even of conversational communication, through a channel where reports of bad experiences are legion. Now... they don't always go bad. In fact most of them work out. But you absolutely stand a bigger chance of taking it in the shorts going this route.
Lets just look at the feedback for the vendor
@Smaug linked to us in Post #1.
Discover the wide range of from AliExpress Top Seller Huizhou Jinyu Sportings Co Ltd Store.Enjoy ✓Free Shipping Worldwide! ✓Limited Time Sale ✓Easy Return.
jinyuebike.aliexpress.com
On AliExpress - their home turf to all intents and purposes - this seller has a review rating of only 91.7%. Now, when rating an Ebay seller, we have a much higher standard than we do reading Ali ratings. A 97% score on Ebay is enough to get you to look elsewhere, right? But on Ali, even with the lower standards we bake into our heads, sub-92% is still low. Click on the Feedback page and even Ali says this in their comparative ratings. And this company - who you expect to take over Two Thousand Dollars of your money and do right by you - achieved that 91.7% rating with only 23 positive sales, 1 neutral and 3 negatives. Figure the neutral is still an unhappy buyer and you have a 4 in 27 chance (14.8%) of being unhappy with your purchase. That shouldn't inspire buyer confidence on any level. You are rolling the dice with more than two grand.
I agree, but not when looking at bikes bought from this channel. These are the ones you have to worry about insofar as new purchases are concerned. Most of the fires and disasters happen with rebuilt or remanufactured cheap parts. But look at the marketplace long enough and even if safety is not your concern, truth in advertising should be.
As noted above, I started out riding this way, and the loss of convenience vs. a plug in and forget single battery was where I landed after improving the process incrementally over a few years. Battery weight is really a non issue. Especially when you acknowledge that a bike with a 300km range is functionally pointless. Your ass will wear out LONG before then, and you'll find a motel with a charge plug, or even a plug at a gas station or roadside cafe somewhere that the owner will let you onto. Been there done that.
As for increased weight, I haven't found that to be a real concern. A single big pack is not light to be sure, but a 30-35ah pack is as much as I've ever used or needed for a full day of riding. And thats not enough to matter on the street. For an emtb you pedal, a 12ah pack is plenty if for no other reason than you are using zero power rolling down hills, and pedaling up them at low power. If you are riding on throttle than fine but thats a different world than e-cycling, with different rules.
I have over 7000 miles on mine. 52v. 70a peak to the wheels. 31ah pack, although this is the bike I learned on insofar as batteries are concerned. Originally it had two separate packs, then two paralleled, now its one single and no way would I go back.
View attachment 11634
And this one, despite having been originally built in 2018 I think, still has two packs because I can't fit a big one in the reduced-size triangle. They are 16ah each and parallel'd together directly with no blender in the middle so 32ah total. 35a+30a controller.
My point in showing it is I was very careful about buying the two packs together at the same time from a responsible vendor - who knew what I was going to do with them. It works, but its absolutely a step down from a single pack centered low in the triangle. Even when I went the extra mile in terms of matching packs, cells and charge cycles - and I take extra precautions charging the two of them together - there's still an added element of risk I would be safer doing without.
I made the best of a potentially bad situation, and thats always what multiple packs are when hooking them together. But I did it anyway. People are free to do the same but don't make the mistake of thinking an added safety concern doesn't exist.
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