Ezee Phyllion battery

[themutiny]

I read time and again about the two year life expectancy of these batteries. I have a question therefore.

I have two batteries, and in line with the advice given, I almost always carry both of them, and when I get where I am going, I swap them over, thereby reducing the strain on each.

My Phylion is now 16 months old, and as a purely academic excercise, I used it to exhaustion the other day. The ride was average with a few hills, and I did try to be economical with the assist, but at the same time I was averaging around 18.5mph, so not that economical.

I got 22.6 miles before it died. When it was new,after conditioning, in similar usage, I used to get around 23/24. Is there a really sharp performance tail-off I should be anticipating, or am I just lucky (can't believe it's the latter, too many contra-indications)

 

[flecc]

No, you're ok, and that's not unusual now. It was the 2006 and early 2007 batteries which were a total disaster, from July 2007 they were improved quite a bit and from January 2008 this latest generation are ok.

I've been running a test one of your battery type since January 2008 and gave it a terrible time in the first six months to try to break it, but despite that ill treatment it's range is only about 10% down in moderate territory after nearly 21 months. It shows it's age in tough hill climb territory though, with lots of very steep hills included in the riding the range is down over 20%, indicating some chemical tiring of the cell contents.

Of course eZee haven't adopted this battery, they've opted instead for the polymer version from another manufacturer on the grounds of lightness, 3.3 kilos instead of 4.4 kilos.
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[themutiny]

Its a shame they haven't IMO. I tried the same test on the 6 month old lipo and it failed at 19 miles.

 

[flecc]

I agree. It seems those testing the lipo over the first six months reported just as favourably over that period, but the reports I've read indicate it's nothing like as good as the new Phylion hard cell battery. The lipo also runs at lower voltages from new, the meter lights dropping under load which the Phylion test battery I ran refused to do under load until I'd reached around 220 charges.

I think that fact that Wai Won Ching had such a bad experience with Phylion's early battery biased him away from them, but he did say he would reconsider them if they proved better over time.
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