Electric Century: 100 miles in a day on an electric bike

Since putting together my Electric Kona Ute I have been toying with the idea of a reaaally big one day ride. 100 miles, or a century ride as roadies call it. The idea is simple. You just need enough batteries. You could load a trailer with batteries on any eBike and go. You could recharge during the ride and carry less batteries, but there are only so many hours in a day.

Why? Well, yes because it is there. But more than that, I get lots of people interested in eBikes, but their objection is that the range of the bike is just too short. This is a common objection people have to electric cars and motorcycles, too. And recharge times take too long, too. So I decided the best way to deal with those objections would be to just go and and do a big ride and see what it takes.

I started by doing the math. I had almost enough battery capacity at my disposal. I figure I need a little more than 50Ah of 36V packs. If I kept a pace of about 15mph and added some pedal power it should be no problem. BUT 15mph is boring. And I wanted to include some hills in my loop, and there would be headwinds. So I brought chargers. There are 4 separate packs, which means 4 chargers and lots of charging ability. If I used 4 chargers at 4A each, I could pump 16Ah back into the packs in a 1 hour lunch stop that I would take anyway. That would increase my range and speed options a lot.

Click on images to see the full res versions in our gallery. I planned the route as a combination of well known scenic routes with places to recharge along the route. This is the route, extracted from my Garmin GPS and displayed on Google earth.

I use my Cycle Analyst and Garmin GPS to keep an eye on things as I ride (no bike computer set up on the Cycle Analyst yet). By the time I get to Cooks, this is the situation:

I am using my Ah faster than I wanted to, but there is nearly 1500 feet of climbing to get from my house to Cooks. Since I will eventually descent that same 1500 feet to get back home, I figure I am ok. Plus, Cooks is very cool and has given me permission to recharge there.


Here the bike is sucking down all the amps I can feed it. A full charge of all the packs costs less than a buck. I don't get to keep my creation out front with all the other cool bikes at Cooks. It needs powahhh. And it is very tipsey with all these packs so I prefer that it be out of the way. Besides that, it is not a Harley. Well, ok, its not even a motorcycle.

So I let it charge and have a look around Cooks. First, let have some breakfast. Good news for Cooks fans who happen to be geeks: they have free Wifi now. You don't even have to mess with a password or logging in. In other geek news, I discovered the Skyfire browser for my Windows phone. It is faster than IE or Opera mobile, it lets me browse sites as a real browser, not WAP, and it supports Active X pages perfectly so far. Even IE does not do that, ironically. And the food was pretty good too. The outdoor setting is very nice.
You never know what you will encounter at Cooks. Unless you read their schedule they post on their website, I guess. There were lots of booths being set up from bike clubs and charities, the lot was full early and the weather was perfect.

I make it through Santiago Canyon and stop for a rest at the plaza at Jamboree Road. I don't recharge the bike here, but I get myself a little energy.

I managed to avoid the glare in most instrument pics, but not this one. Still you can see my progress. Another 500 feet of climbing. The Garmin measures cumulative climbing, not net. So if you go up and down a 100 foot hill 10 times,it will show 1000ft of climbing.

The next leg of the trip was down Jamboree, then east on Portola a short distance to pick up the bike trail that continues south all the way across the Back Bay.

Did I mention is was great weather for a ride?

From the Back Bay it is a short, beautiful trip over PCH to Balboa Island. I took the ferry across the harbor to reach the peninsula...and because I love taking the ferry. The big party barge passed in front of us, but I can't really say the got in our way. No one was in any kind of hurry.

The Balboa Fun Zone was living up to its name. There was a lot of activity, including happy kids, even in November.

I passed by the second recharge station, which is in a park on the peninsula, figuring I would use it when I doubled back and came this way again. There was a big pet fair going on and the police department had a booth. There was a police motorcycle parked next to where I wanted to charge. I am still cautious when riding the electric bike. Not all law enforcement officials are aware that electric bikes are legal. And I was pretty sure recharging from an outlet in a public park was OK. But I did not want to have to discuss the whole thing with a cop if I could avoid it.

I hoped things would clear out by the time I passed back there again. I followed the coast to Huntington Beach, where I turned around. The weather was in the upper 60s. Between that and the time of the year, the beaches were almost completely empty. That used to really amaze me when I first moved to California, but I am used to it now.

So I turned around and headed back to Balboa to my recharging station. The pet fair was still going but at least the police motorcycle was gone. The Gazebo was being used for presentations and a sound board was plugged into one of the outlets. That left 3 more outlets for me and I had a power strip. But I was afraid of throwing a circuit breaker. I settled on plugging in the two of the 4 chargers. The sound system did not crash. That was nice. I retrieved some Mexican food from Great Mex - a place frequented by the locals - and joined the fair and ate while the bike charged again. Sorry, no pics of the food this time.

Then I added up the time it would take to finish and realized I would be riding in the dark. I departed and quickly made my way back to San Clemente. I had equipped my lights before I left for just this possibility. I was coming up short on miles as I approached the turn off of coast highway that would take me home, so I rode back and forth on coast highway until I knew I would hit 100 miles as I got home.

Commited to a night ride at this point, I stopped in the flagging light to assess my situation and get in a couple more pics. I figure I have plenty of Ah left. So I don't attempt to conserve any for the final miles. I finish well after dark with my trusty Light and Motion Stella 200 blasting a cone of 200 well focused lumens in front of me. That and the nice evening temps actually make the night ride portion fun, short though it was.

I finally arrive home.

Some final stats.

So my estimates were close. It took a little over 50Ah and I used a little over 18 Wh/m. And the 4000ft of cumulative climbing was more than I figured on. It required some capacity as well. I estimate I had 10AH left or so by the time was done.

I may go for it again after the Ute gets a series of changes, like frame mounted batteries and some other small stuff taken care of.