I have an ebay-purchased folder. The bike itself is brilliant for the modest price and is now three years old. I ordered a new battery from an Amazon supplier and went painstakingly through the specs with the seller before committing. However when the battery (36v 10ah) arrived the polarity markings had been scratched out, and after investigating I found they were wrong way round compared with the old battery, so back it went.
The battery I am after is the slide-on-the-saddle-tube type (you slide it down the tube and the bottom of the battery connects with two large pins sticking up from the controller box). There seem to be two distinct types of these batteries. With the narrow sliding part facing upwards the plus is on the right and minus on the left. The other type (the wrong one for my bike) has two plusses and two minusses etched on the bottom casing and they are the opposite way round.
I then searched for literally days and think I might have found just one battery that might be correct for my folder but I am not sure I can put faith in the supplier.
What I did notice though, is that it is not only low cost folders that suffer from lack of battery spares. Almost every single website I surfed, some of which are "premium" e-bike sellers, had no pages or links to ANY spare batteries at all. Some of these brands are extremely well known.
Just a few websites actually advertised spare batteries but with a couple of notable exceptions the batteries on offer rarely covered more than a quarter of the e-bikes the same supplier was selling.
So it seems reasonable to conclude that the dearth of batteries is affecting all classes of e-bikes. Two suppliers stood out as exceptions: The Electric Transport Shop in Cambridge offers spare batteries for nearly all of their e-bikes. Kudos seemed to offer some spare batteries but unfortunately the chap I spoke to there was curt and extremely abrupt and after a very unhelpful conversation I gave up.
I would be interested in two things: to hear of anyone else's experience trying to track down a spare battery, and whether anyone knows of a reliable supplier of the battery type I am looking for.
I wonder too how many on this forum have ended up so frustrated at trying to find a battery they simply give up and end up buying a whole new e-bike as the only guarantee of actually finding a battery at all!
The battery I am after is the slide-on-the-saddle-tube type (you slide it down the tube and the bottom of the battery connects with two large pins sticking up from the controller box). There seem to be two distinct types of these batteries. With the narrow sliding part facing upwards the plus is on the right and minus on the left. The other type (the wrong one for my bike) has two plusses and two minusses etched on the bottom casing and they are the opposite way round.
I then searched for literally days and think I might have found just one battery that might be correct for my folder but I am not sure I can put faith in the supplier.
What I did notice though, is that it is not only low cost folders that suffer from lack of battery spares. Almost every single website I surfed, some of which are "premium" e-bike sellers, had no pages or links to ANY spare batteries at all. Some of these brands are extremely well known.
Just a few websites actually advertised spare batteries but with a couple of notable exceptions the batteries on offer rarely covered more than a quarter of the e-bikes the same supplier was selling.
So it seems reasonable to conclude that the dearth of batteries is affecting all classes of e-bikes. Two suppliers stood out as exceptions: The Electric Transport Shop in Cambridge offers spare batteries for nearly all of their e-bikes. Kudos seemed to offer some spare batteries but unfortunately the chap I spoke to there was curt and extremely abrupt and after a very unhelpful conversation I gave up.
I would be interested in two things: to hear of anyone else's experience trying to track down a spare battery, and whether anyone knows of a reliable supplier of the battery type I am looking for.
I wonder too how many on this forum have ended up so frustrated at trying to find a battery they simply give up and end up buying a whole new e-bike as the only guarantee of actually finding a battery at all!