I'm baffled... either this motor sucks, or something is wrong with mine. Rode the bike to work this morning again... this stupid piece of shit start overheating 3.7mi into my ride, at assist level 6, while maintaining 150-200w of motor power. My ride to work is 6.1 miles total with an elevation gain of 164' total, which mostly comes in the last 3 miles. Ambient temps on my ride were
I definitely regret buying this thing. The information in this thread made it seem at least capable of 200-250w nominal over an hour, and in my experience, it's not capable of anything close to that.
3.7 miles in, and it's starting to shut down due to heat...
.4 miles later, it's toast. been running at 100w of power since then.
I shut it off for 1 mile and just pedaled on my own.
From here, even letting it pull 50-100w of output was causing it to overheat.
So yeah... Where does that leave me? This thing sucks. I'm a tinkerer and I'm for sure willing to mess around with something to make it better or get the most out of it. However, I've got around $1,200 into this conversion and I don't even see a shred of capacity in this thing for any real cycling usage. I'm without a doubt, better off as a cyclist, and even a commuter without this thing on my bike.
I guess what bums me out the most is that I over spent in this case to buy the thing pre-setup for eco-ebike. Those guys did a great job, and provided some of the best pre-purchase customer service I've experienced in a long while (bike industry or otherwise). However, this motor is purely a letdown and if I could do it all over again, I'd just forgo buying a tsdz2 entirely.
So where to now? I'm going to tear this thing down, look for anything obvious and install the temp mods... Once that doesn't work (I'm pretty certain it's not going to work, I can't even get this thing to do 4 miles without overheating)... I guess I'll take it off the bike and sell it. I wish it were at least good enough to sell the bike whole on craigslist and profit off of the Santacruz name and lack of availability... but I can't in good conscious do that with how utterly shit this thing is.