JohnMcL7

I've spoken with Giant who have helpfully provided the following part number as a compatible battery with the bike: 244M36500R-03V - EnergyPak 500 Carrier Type UART 36V-500Wh I found variants of the battery with three, four, five or six pins and some listed as with energy recuperation and some without, I had wondered if I bought a compatible charger would that work with this bike. However I've found the battery with the three pin charger socket is not compatible because it has different contacts (non-can vs can) although not clear if with or without energy recuperation makes any difference. I've ordered the battery through my local Giant dealer although the price looks like it's going to be hefty but at least it will be in the UK with warranty. Although there's none of these batteries available in the UK so it's going to have to be shipped from Europe. It's likely discussed elsewhere but it does make me wonder what other people did with their Giant E-bikes that used this battery type given it's likely most of these batteries now will have failed due to age. I expected the main problem to be cost when it came to replacing the battery but I didn't expect it to be so difficult to even source one.

I've been having a hunt around and ebike24 seem to have an Energypak 500 for sale with the five pin socket: https://www.ebike24.com/giant-energypak-luggage-rack-battery-500-wh?number=2605-002 I'm assuming this would be compatible with the bike and they seem to ship to the UK plus the few posts I've seen on ebike24 here seem to be ok. Assuming I get hammered on VAT it will come to a bit over £600 which doesn't seem too bad for a brand new battery given at the moment I'm struggling with options.

I've looked over the battery but I can't see any Yamaha badges, only Giant ones. I'm not an electronics person and would be concerned about frying something so if there's any known good repairers are worth giving a shout, I'd appreciate any recommendations.

My Mum has a Giant Prime+ ebike (or something like that), it's a stepthrough hybrid with derailleur gearing and the battery is an Energypak 400 which slides into the top of the rear rack. The battery hasn't been used in the last couple of years and when the charger is attached is shows a solid red light then changes to a flashing red light so I'm pretty sure the battery is dead and not charging. I've had a look around and unsurprisingly with it being an older battery I can't find any compatible ones for sale. It appears the only viable option would be to use a battery repair/refurbishment service although I've noticed some explain that they replace all the cells for older batteries as they don't think it's worth replacing individual cells. If this is the only option I'd appreciate any recommendations for a company to use and a rough estimated cost, most of the sites I looked at were not showing prices although one seemed to quote around £400.

A second hand Wisper came up locally but she preferred the crank drive on the Giant. John

1.95" tyres are very skinny these days and 60 psi is huge, my 29er runs 2.4s at around 25-30psi maximum - I will admit I wouldn't last long on sub 2in tyres at 60 psi. When I'm talking about bigger tyres, plus sized tyres (26+/27.5+/29+) are around 2.8 to 3.2 wide and the fat bike tyres start at 3.8 up to just over 5 wide. The tyres aren't just wider but they're taller as well and you can run them at lower pressures, I have the 29+ at around 8psi and the 26x3.8 tyres at 3psi on the front. Going from that to the 29er with a 120mm air fork was surprisingly hard going on my wrists as the tyres do all the work smoothing out the surface whereas the suspension doesn't work well over small bumps. I wouldn't ride a rigid anything less than a 3in tyre although even then the tyre does noticeably less work than the 4in tyre. However the tyres can't absorb impacts which is where I find suspension is invaluable particularly as the more speed you carry, the smoother the bike will go over drops and jumps.

I'm not sure about range, we've been going out 20-30 miles and I think it would be nice to get a bit more range I think my Mum is ok with that range as otherwise the ride gets too long.

Personally for rough surfaces I prefer a rigid fork with a wider, softer tyre as I find it far more comfortable than a suspension fork even though my two suspension bikes both have high end air forks on them. Suspension however works better with large movements so great for drops or somewhere that it takes an impact but on rough surfaces they aren't as smooth with lots of small movements. With the plus market really opening up this year there's a lot of good choice to run 27.5+ tyres on a 29er frame although it's dependent on the frame how much clearance there is.

Yeah, she's a medium unfortunately so all the bargains I've found are in large sizes. Is a Bosch system a better choice than a Yamaha one? The Bosch Felt is reduced to £1800 which isn't much less than the Giant Yamaha although I don't know if it is a better deal than it looks to get the Bosch system aside from the much better interface on the Bosch system.

As with everything in mountain biking, there's tradeoffs for everything. I bought a rigid bike for winter use simply for the reduced maintenance but also like the feel as well, the front of the bike lifts easier, I feel more in control and there's nothing lost when you pedal hard. Where I find the rigid forks weak are on fast downhill sections, the suspension forks easily soak up impacts for jumps and drops making it easier to carry speed. Plus it's a lot easier on the body, I did an endurance race at a trail centre and it was basically climb all the way up and then shoot all the way down, I eventually called it a day as my shoulders and hips were aching from long fast downhill sections whereas on the full suspension bike I could just unlock the suspension and roll it down the hills with ease. John

That in a nutshell is why you need port forwarding. NAT (Network Address Translation) is a feature on your router that allows multiple devices in your house to use the one IP address externally - the router cleverly manages all the outgoing requests so that each device that sends a request out say for a web page, gets the right web page data back. The problem is while the router knows which device sent the outgoing requests, if an incoming request is received on its own the router doesn't know what to do with it. This is where port forwarding comes into it - port forwarding sets rules on your router and tells it how to handle incoming traffic by explicitly defining which device it should send the traffic on certain ports to. So if you have a webserver on internal port 192.168.1.100, you'd set a port forwarding rule to set all port 80 traffic to go to 192.168.1.100. Your problem of course is that you have more than one device and you can only choose one on port 80 to port forward to at a time. The way around this is to set each camera on a different port so you'd redirect port 80 to say 192.168.1.100, set the second camera to respond on port 81 and therefore set port 81 to redirect to 192.168.1.101 etc. Then externally you'd choose http://x.x.x.x:81 to go to the second camera, http://x.x.x.x:82 to go to the second camera and so on (where x.x.x.x is the external IP address) If you do this, you'll also need to use the different port number internally as well so the second camera would be 192..68.1.101:81 as well and wouldn't work on just 192.168.1.101 John

My Mum has had an ebike for a month as part of a local system to encourage cycling and it has to go back tomorrow but she's giving serious thought to purchasing one in the Spring as she's had a lot of use out of this one. The hire bike is I think a 2015 version of this one: https://www.giant-bicycles.com/en-gb/bikes/model/prime.e.2/24986/92032/ Much the same spec from what I can see but nine speed rather than ten, she likes the step through frame, the crank drive motor, the rack/mudguards and the derailleur gears. She was hiring an older Giant model the year before that was similar but with rim brakes and hub gears, she prefers the derailleuer gearing and although was fine with rim brakes I think the hydraulic disc brakes are the better choice. I thought it was worth checking to see if there's any good bargains on similar bikes that would be worth considering to buy now, I saw a nice Felt for supposedly £500 off but it's still around the £1800 mark. I've seen a few references to cheap Cube bikes but they seem to be done so thought it work asking if there's any others worth looking at . Thanks, John

It's a horrible motorsport moment when Colin McRae almost got Skoda their first WRC win in the Fabia but the team decided to make a cautionary gearbox change, mucked it up and McRae couldn't rejoin the race. I think Skoda are still running Fabias but in the lower categories at the moment. VW are doing pretty well in motorsport at the moment with Audi taking the last few Le Mans wins and Porsche this year, the Polo has taken the WRC constructors again, the R8 GT3's have had some great results the last couple of years and in the MotoGP, Ducati have been far more competitive than they have been for years. Apparently there is still talk of VW joining F1 but it seems unlikely given the amount of money they're going to lose over the emissions scandal. Plus they're going in two years behind the other manufacturers and the tight constraints of the requirements clearly make it difficult to produce a competitive, reliable, economic engine. While VW group do have a lot of current motorsport experience, time and time again similar companies have tried their hand at F1 and got nowhere. John

I think this is a good indicator of what high speed actually looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=In9XQZFPv0o I enjoy motorsports and driving at high speeds but not on public roads, I've only been up to around 120mph on the track but what's quite scary about it is how quickly everything happens (you're onto corners far quicker than you'd think) and how much more distance it takes to slow the car. On public roads though I'm a fairly sedate driver as you have to be able to react to other driver's not just your own behaviour and a lot of the time doing a lot of overtaking to try and get quicker up the road doesn't save that much time. Even aside from the risk the 192mph driver was putting himself and others under, I don't see the point - if I could afford nice performance cars like that they'd be off to track day events where I could properly enjoy them. John

Dashware was bought by GoPro and is now free: http://www.dashware.net/ It's a powerful piece of software but I found it finicky to use and I'm a fairly technical person, Virb Edit is pretty easy to use and also free: http://www.garmin.com/en-GB/shop/downloads/virb-edit Although it's Garmin's software for their Virb cameras I think it should work with any mp4 and gpx/fit file. John

Agreed, my Mum has been renting an e-bike so I've been going out with her on my road bike which is good for both of us as she enjoys it and I get a much better work out than I expected. 15mph doesn't sound that fast but the fact it can mostly do that into headwinds, up hills etc. and it's faster than it sounds, I set several personal bests trying to keep up with the e-bike. I think the 15mph is sensible bearing in mind there's no training required unlike a moped which isn't that fast but needs a CBT minimum to ride it on the road along with a variety of other requirements. Yes, a decent road cyclist can go faster particularly if it's all flat but they're likely a decent experienced cyclist whereas anyone could hop on an e-bike and as it stands they're still going to be amongst the faster cyclists on the road. John

On average what sort of usable life do people find they get from the batteries before they need replaced or is that very much a how long is a piece of string question? My Mum has seen a Wisper 906 Alpino bike for sale locally second hand and the general running gear on the bike looks good, she's hired an e-bike a few times and loved it but wasn't considering one herself until she saw this one. My concern is the battery seems a real gamble and this thread confirms my thoughts, if it does need replaced that wipes a good chunk of the second hand saving off the bike. I've found the batteries on garden tools (strimmers and mowers) not to have a particularly great usable life before they need replaced. John