My Sun Trip Bike, Back to Back Tandem Trike with Rowing Generator, Pedals, +Solar

Hi Justin,

Thanks for these very interesting insights !
It's very fun to see how "solarizing" an e-bike has huge consequences on the way to handle it, the rythm, the roads and paths chosen etc...
Distances covered, even by the old competitors such as Françoise Denel, are really impressive.
It's maybe a bit soon but do you think solar ebikes have a future outside SunTrip or long distance world travellers such as @Solarebike ?
Do you plan to develop some dedicated products with your company ?

Justin and Anne-Sophie by phone :wink:

[youtube]2wad0FuNMsc[/youtube]

It's those experiences that become the memories.

Limezy said:

It's very fun to see how "solarizing" an e-bike has huge consequences on the way to handle it, the rythm, the roads and paths chosen etc...
Distances covered, even by the old competitors such as Françoise Denel, are really impressive.

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That's true, especially when the sun is out. I'd say it's quite easy to double the viable daily touring range with a good solar assist setup. A lot of us now are in for several days of rain and even thunderclouds (have a look at the Belgrade Forecast to see what we're heading into), and I'm sure many people are wishing that they had a lightweight touring bike instead right now. Or were able to just hang out and enjoy whatever town they are in and then continue when it's sunny again rather than trucking on.

It's maybe a bit soon but do you think solar ebikes have a future outside SunTrip or long distance world travellers such as @Solarebike ?

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YES! I've gone from being a total solar skeptic into really getting them. On a more relaxed kind of travel adventure, where you are free to charge with a normal charger when required it'd be perfect. Most of the time the sun alone will be more than enough, you don't have the hassle of stopping and planning charging points. We got over 3kWhr a day for the first few legs which is an insane amount of energy for a day. With mixed sun and clouds it's more like 1.5 kWhr, which is still plenty for a modest day's travel. In summer time that should account for most days with none of the hassle or delays associated with hunting for charging outlets that encumbers normal ebike touring.

But right now with rainclouds, the solar output is about 50 watts, not enough to overcome the drag and weight of the motors and panel assembly. If I could have charged up overnight that would have been sweet.

There are already quite a number of people who are doing solar ebikes outside of this Suntrip event. For instance we crossed paths with this french couple in Slovenia a few days ago, who are doing their own adventure by solar ebike and have a nice blog about it:
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https://dusoleildanslesroues.com/2018/06/25/slovenie-nous-voila-2000-kms-au-compteur-et-toujours-chauds-patates/

They've each got Bafang BBS style drives with solar panels on a trailer. About half what a typical Suntrip rider would use but more than enough for a less aggressive travel distance goals. I imagine we'll be seeing more and more people with setups like this.

The utility of solar ebikes outside of long distance touring but instead for day to day commuting? That's not so clear. But if you have outdoors parking space at work for the bike, then it could be handy and even a small 50-75 watt panel would be enough to keep a battery topped up while working without having to take the battery off the bike and bring it indoors.

Do you plan to develop some dedicated products with your company ?

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It's looking likely
http://www.ebikes.ca/shop/electric-bicycle-parts/solar.html

Nicely done Justin. Great to see your setup working so well. I could only dream of 'just' 50w on a cloudy day. :lol:

justin_le said:

The utility of solar ebikes outside of long distance touring but instead for day to day commuting? That's not so clear. But if you have outdoors parking space at work for the bike, then it could be handy and even a small 50-75 watt panel would be enough to keep a battery topped up while working without having to take the battery off the bike and bring it indoors.

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This is me.
I've been commuting on my E-BikeE with solar for over 2 years now. As an IT contractor I typically work at various locations through my city (Canberra) and can usually manage to find an outside parking space where I can lock it up, angle it towards the sun and let it charge all day while I work.

I started with a 15w panel, then 30, now I have a 40w panel and am in the process of fitting it. It should get me somewhere around 150Wh of charge per day on a good day which is 20% of my total battery capacity (750Wh) or about 10km range. With another panel on the back (which I'm thinking about doing) and another on a roof, I could see it being possible to have a fully self charging commuter vehicle, but it starts to sacrifice practicality at some point so not something I am going to do just yet. I still have to ride this thing every day and navigate past other cyclists and traffic.

Cheers

I meant to post these images a while ago. In the rowing machine at a gym if I just do a relaxed stroke, it ends up being a flat and even force curve like you see here.



If instead I row hard, the legs have much more power than the arms, and so during the first half of the stroke there is a large hump of force from the legs expanding, while the 2nd half has about half this force while the arms and back complete the stroke.

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During that first portion of the stroke when the legs are pulling hard, the arms experience the full tension on the rope as well even though they aren't doing any work, and it's a bit like being on a stretcher. In the mechanism that we have with the leg motion linked through a pulley, the arms only experience half of this tension force when the legs are pushing. (see https://endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=1375676#p1375676) I think that makes it easier and with a more uniform force stroke on the drive when we are rowing hard, but sadly didn't have time to install a torque sensor to measure this.

Does it make our rowing any easier? Who knows!

An update on the rowing rig is that some aspects of it are working excellent. After 150km or so it feels so good to switch over from pedaling to rowing, or rowing to pedaling. I thought that I would be doing about 75% rowing and Anne-Sophie just 25%, but in the end it's been about 50:50 split. We both have sore knee joints after a while and the change in motion is so welcome. I'm really happy about this which was one of the design goals of the setup.

Mechanically, we screwed up big time in not initially building the row->crank linkage with a White Industries freewheel. I'd posted before about how one of the pawl springs broke during the initial rides in France
https://endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=1388556#p1388556

Removing the broken spring and two associated pawls got us rolling fine again, but on Monday after another ~1000km the remaining springs failed, only now we're in southern Croatia with no large cities in site, at 6:00pm on a national holiday. Google showed one result for bicycle store about 30km further on so we ride there, expecting to find a commercial bicycle shop that might be open the following morning. Instead it's a house in a residential block with this small sign on the front



Not feeling too hopeful we rung the doorbell, and sure enough an older gentleman comes out and lets us know that it's his son's business, who's out with friends but will call right now. We get served hot drinks and fruits from their orchard and then 15 minutes later his son Danijel is over. He's got a full service/repair shop in his garage and has a side operation both repairing and restoring bicycles.



I explain the situation and show the broken freewheeling doublecrankset, and he has the perfect attitude of "well, let's see what we can do". Some hacking and grinding later and he's got the original seized freewheel off the custom adapter, and happens to have a replacement 16T single speed freewheel to clamp on it place.

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By 8pm everything was fixed. We tried soo hard to offer any kind of payment but he wouldn't take it. The treatment that we've received in Croatia like this has been astounding. We greased the threads before screwing this freewheel on so that in the future now we'll be able to remove and replace it easily enough. The plan is to pickup a couple replacement freewheels at a bike shop in Belgrade to have on hand in case we have any further problems, and then we'll be able to do on-the-road repairs if this happens again. And in the meantime it gets us rolling and rowing again which is great.

StuRat said:

It's those experiences that become the memories.

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Indeed. And a huge thank you to Danijel and his family who treated us so well.
https://m.facebook.com/UsbDanijelPerisic/

What a great story!

I can't help but wonder if the guy who sold this unassuming trike to them on Craigslist has any notion of what has become of it or the adventure it's on...

justin_le said:

Anyways quite out of the blue in the hunt for hackable trikes we came across this on Craigslist:

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justin_le said:

But in the evenings and mornings, you can get 3-4 times more average solar energy if you stop and point the panels right at the sun, compared to riding when they'll frequently be shaded or not optimally aligned.

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To illustrate, here's the output of a 188W solar ebike trailer riding in Northern California in June, 2-3 hours before sunset on a twisty, hilly road with lots of trees. Peak output is 168W but average is only 63W under these conditions.

There's now a quickie PDF posted on the Grin web site that describes the Analogger mod to get GPS data into the CA.

You can find it under "Learn / documents / Cycle Analogger Manuals"
It's listed as "Cycle Analogger GPS mod for CA hookup"

Here's a link to the Grin web page:
http://www.ebikes.ca/learn/documents.html

This mod coupled with the experimental firmware JLE linked >>here<< will get the same displays and data from your CA3+Analogger that the Sun Tour participants get with the custom Solar DataBoxes.

Have fun!

teklektik said:

There's now a quickie PDF posted on the Grin web site that describes the Analogger mod to get GPS data into the CA. [...snipped...]

Have fun!

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Awesome! Thanks for all your hard work on this.

I just recorded a ride video and used DashWare to overlay the CA data. I'll post the edited video later. Here's a screen cap. I've already learned several things from this video that 2000 miles (3000 km) of road testing this rig didn't teach me.




UPDATE: Video is now posted https://youtu.be/bSMugd-wGD0

Cowardlyduck said:

With another panel on the back (which I'm thinking about doing) and another on a roof, I could see it being possible to have a fully self charging commuter vehicle, but it starts to sacrifice practicality at some point so not something I am going to do just yet. I still have to ride this thing every day and navigate past other cyclists and traffic.

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Exactly. For me while commuting through traffic agility is of topmost importance. There's something a little bit frustrating when we are riding through with this solar trike that we can't just weave between cars and congestion, but instead have to stay in the auto's queue.

That point of where practicality gets sacrificed definitely shifts a lot with panel efficiency, and it's exciting to think what could be in store if ~30% efficient or higher solar cells became commercialized for mainstream. If we could get 150 watts from a panel that's just 1m x 0.5m, that's getting to be a pretty seriously useful charge current from a pretty manageable panel size.

Thanks Teklektic and Solarebiker for sharing technical analysis info from analogger/CA files. I'm going to be pulling all the logged trip data to date once we get to Sofia, Bulgaria after the weekend, and give ourselves a rest day. Then there will be plenty plenty of raw data to play with.

In the meantime, we've definitely NOT been moving close to our initially planned 200km / day pace and are about 2 days behind the original schedule at this point in the trip. Earlier when the weather was good we kept having nice visits or interruptions that would last for like 1.5 hours, and then we'd loose about 40km of travel time in the process.

Then the day after we had mechanical issues with the freewheel on the rowing drum linkage, we had one flat tire on the rear wheel in the morning, another in the afternoon, and then a 3rd flat like an hour after that! Up until this point we hadn't had a single issue with flats and were running Schwalbe marathon plus on each wheel.

The first two flats in the day looked to me like pinch flats and I made sure to run full pressure on the tire after fixing them. But when I looked at the 3rd flat tire, the leak was actual directly on the 1st patch that I had put on at the start of the day, with exactly the same wear pattern as I saw originally

View attachment 1

It turned out that the leaks were happening from the result of a small tear in the sidewall of the marathon plus tires, and this produced a sharp edge that was cutting into the inner tube right at the sidwall tear. Once I saw this it all made sense



That tire was therefor hooped, but luckily we brought with us two much larger 20" x 2.8" tires as spares that we picked up from Canadian Tire. Each of these went on the front wheel, and then one of the front Marathon Plus tires became the new rear wheel.

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At first after swapping out I was miffed at the extra drag from these large knobby low pressure tires, but once we hit rough Serbian roads and the trike just glided over without any rattle or shock to the frame, I fell in love. It used to be that the person on the front of the trike would holler out "BUMP" to the person rowing whenever there was a manhole cover, pothole, rough patch etc. imminent. Now we roll over these things without even noticing, with the call "BUMP" being reserved mostly for actual speed bumps. There's so much less shock on the frame, and we can also much more easily climb onto curbs or into the gravel/grass when fast drivers don't leave us enough room.

Now that I've experienced this it's going to be hard to go back to normal high pressure tires on the front. The extra ~1 Wh/km consumption due to the extra rolling drag is soooo worth it.

Did anyone else spot the super soaker water squirt gun strapped to the trike? What's it for?

thepronghorn said:

Did anyone else spot the super soaker water squirt gun strapped to the trike? What's it for?

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I'm going to go with stray dogs, the bane of a touring cyclist's existence.

I'm hoping the Super-Soaker is there for entertainment purposes on hot days. :^)

I'm not familiar with Schwalbe sidewalls, but in the past I've repaired tire rips and tears similar to that using tube patches. In fact my front tire currently has a nearly 1/2 inch jagged gash that is being reinforced by one patch that is overlaid with a larger patch.

I also always carry a sheet of Tyvek (old 5 1/2" floppy sleeve) as a second way to deal with such emergency repairs. The idea is to wrap the tube with Tyvek in the area of the tire fault. The fibers in the Tyvek provide the reinforcement that the tube needs to prevent it from blowing out the where the tire has been damaged. And while I haven't had the need to try it yet, I've also started carrying 1" Gorilla tape that I think could be used for similar situations - perhaps even more effectively since it has the adhesive to help secure things.

Even a dollar bill (or similar) will work for quite a while, but the tyvek works better.


(BTW, that's 5.25" rather than 5.5", for the floppy disk and if you have an 8" sleeve it'll work too)

I carry a few inches of Schwalbe SnakeSkin sidewall with the bead trimmed away from an old tire carcass to glue behind a slash - basically a rubberized densely woven nylon graft. I haven't used it on my bike but installed such a patch on a stranded cyclist slashed tire. It inflated fine, looked good, and he rode away a happy guy. No info on longevity...

amberwolf said:

(BTW, that's 5.25" rather than 5.5", for the floppy disk and if you have an 8" sleeve it'll work too)

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Yeah - I thought about that when I typed it but was too lazy to look it up. 5.25 and 3.5. 8" was before my time. But my first PC, a Leading Edge Model D did have the dual 5 1/4" floppy drives. I still have it.

Amazing story and insights Justin and Anne-Sophie. I look forward to catching up when you return to BC

solarEbike said:

thepronghorn said:

Did anyone else spot the super soaker water squirt gun strapped to the trike? What's it for?

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I'm going to go with stray dogs, the bane of a touring cyclist's existence.

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Bingo! Anne-Sophie had many bad experiences with dogs when she was unicycling across South America so she wanted us to be prepared, and read on a cycling forum that a squirt gun with vinegar works well to put a chasing dog in it's place. Seemed that the backwards facing rider would be in the perfect spot to be on dog defense.

However, the one time it's been used AnSo was reaching back for the gun in a panic and pulled the trigger continuously while trying to unleash it, completely soaking me and our navigation tablet. I was laughing in hysterics the rest of the day. When she finally got it free and pointed the right way, the dog was like hmm, water so what, and was already slowing down anyways.

So far it's just been Serbia with lots of stray dogs on the streets, but most of them either watched us roll by with idle curiosity or stop running after a small half-hearted chase. It's not really been an issue though now the squirt gun is part of our rig fixture and will stay for the trip.

5 border crossings so far and no border guards have asked about it either, I thought we'd at least get some joking from them.

ScorpionKing said:

Justin, at Recumbent Cycle Con which is put on my Recumbent and Tandem Magazine, we has a presentation by Azub where we saw some pretty terrible road conditions in some of the area's you are going to be traveling in. Are the Solar Panels working out as well as you thought they would?

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Electrically for sure. When the angles are right (ie we are heading in a northerly our southerly direction and can tilt the panels to fully face the sun) we'll see 400-450 watts often enough.

With clouds it's really interesting and varied. There are times when the sky is covered in clouds without a blue patch in sight and yet we're getting like 300 watts on the panels, with tons of diffuse sunlight still making it through. Other cloud filled skies which appear to look just the same only allow 80-100 watts of power in. However, when you look straight up you can normally feel the difference on your face between these two cloud situations.

When the clouds are darker grey, then it drops down to 20-30 watts, and when we have rain clouds bearing down (which has happened a LOT the past 4 days) the solar drops to near zero, and then we seek refuge under the panel for rain protection.

However the best condition is not a clear blue sky but a cloudy sky which happens to have an opening for the sun to shine through. Then you end up with both the direct solar light from the sun, PLUS all the diffuse light from the adjacent clouds. At one stage after a rainy morning in Italy we saw over 590 watts from our 550W peak panel.





It was like magic, literally the silver linings of the clouds doing this. Sadly the circumstances for this are normally short lived.

The converse situation is also true, if we have a clear blue sky with just a single cloud in front of the sun, then we end up with like 30-40 watts, much less than if the entire sky was cloudy. Luckily these situations don't last long.

Structurally the roof has been holding up decently well given the total last minute and untested nature of the foam+fiberglass construction. When we assembled it in France I was short one M4 nyloc nut so only put 1 rather than 2 screws on one of the front supports. That came back to bite me since the shock on the front of the roof caused this one screw and washer to puncture through the thin fiberglass wall so it's not really holding it securely, and then the roof could bounce and it the support structure here which has caused the fiberglass rib to crack a bit and no longer holds the edge of the panel totally straight.


View attachment 4

View attachment 3


The other 3 attachment points are all fine. My plan was to reinforce this damaged mount with some sheet metal but now that we have the large 2.8" front tires, the shock on the roof even with bumpy roads is so much less that it's not really getting any worse.

Also, where the two halves of the roof join in the middle there is now a noticeable sag at the joint so it's not totally flat across the top. It's not a bit detail but I'm likely going to use a strut and string to do some triangulation to pull the mid section upwards a bit.

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And finally, the roof tilting mechanism initially had two hand turn knobs for locking or unlocking the rolling wheels, but these were M5 threads in an aluminum plate and I forgot to grease them before the trip. At some point in Croatia the rear adjustment became seized as the aluminum/stainless galled, and then when I unscrewed it all the threads shore off.



So we're now using tools to loosen/tighten the roof for pivoting and have to stop and dismount for that which is annoying compared to being able to adjust it while riding.

Are there improvements you would make to the setup?

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Suspension! More USB charge ports, easier to access camera holders, and retractable side curtains off the roof that we could pull down for better water protection during heavy downpours. And a better job of having organized stowage containers for all the various odds and ends so that we can be faster and more efficient about packing/unpacking or getting supplies (like sunscreen, duct tape, gronala bar, a USB charging cable etc). We've been making additions and modifications the last few days and will be doing more today as we wait in Sofia for a care package from Grin to arrive.

I am hoping, when you have time, that you will do a detailed presentation of the solar/regen technical details, suppliers, performance, wiring, etc. Basically, I am looking for guidance on the most efficient solar set up for a bike. In all the Sun Trip posts and videos I have gone over, I haven't found this yet.

Thanks and thanks for all of your wonderful posting for us armchairs.

Following this thread with much interest and wish you well for the rest of the trip. Enjoy!

There are a bunch of us old-timers, I'm sure, lurking along in this forum. It's hard to believe it's been 10 years since Justin stopped by on his cross-Canada trek. With the engineering, these updates, and following along with the tracker data on Google Earth - this is a great adventure to ride along with vicariously . Wishing Justin and An-So safe passage and a timely return to Canada.