Discover the #1 Maintenance Tip for Safe EBike Riding! Electric Bike Important Info

Hey everyone. I'm Dustin. I've nearly 20 years of experience in the bike and e-bike industry, and today I'm going to tell you the one maintenance item that you need to know about for e-bikes to keep you safe. Stick around to hear what it is.

All right, so today I'm going to tell you the one maintenance item you have to know about to stay safe on e-bikes. But before I get into it, hit that subscribe button below, stay in touch with us here at sixthreezero, and be the first to know about all the new content we're putting out, giveaways we do, and of course, new product releases. Okay, e-bikes are so much fun, doing a lot of great things for society, but they also can be dangerous if not ridden and cared for properly. And there are lots of things you should know about with e-bikes in terms of upkeep and maintenance, but there's one major thing everybody needs to know about and stay on top of, and that is your brakes. The brakes are one of the most pivotal elements of an electric bike, as they are any mobility transportation device; cars, bikes, scooters, and motorcycles. The brakes are essential. We know that.

I think the one thing that I've noticed is when people go from a regular bike to an e-bike, there's different levels of maintenance required. On a regular bike, especially if you're a casual recreational rider, your brake pads may honestly last years, especially if you're not doing a lot of braking or you're doing casual riding and you're not reaching very high speeds. Let's say you're only going five, six, seven, eight miles an hour, right? You're not going to wear those pads down very fast, so those pads can last a long time. And I would say most recreational riders are going to have a caliper brake pad that goes on the rim, versus most e-bikes have disc brakes, and so it's a different level of maintenance, it's a different degree to which the brakes wear down.

And so, you don't necessarily have to know how to do the brake maintenance, but if you could learn that, that's a really good thing, but you have to know what to look for and you have to pay attention to where your brakes are, where your brake pads are, how much brake pad you have left because that's greatly going to affect the stopping power of your e-bike.

So a couple of things about e-bikes. With e-bikes, most people are going to be traveling at faster speeds on an e-bike than they are on a regular bike. So you're traveling, let's say 15 miles an hour on average, or even 12 miles an hour on average, and a regular bike you're traveling at, let's say, eight miles an hour on average. Every time you break at eight miles an hour versus 13 miles an hour, those brakes are going to wear down faster if you're braking at higher speeds, just like a car. If you're constantly going 65 miles an hour and hitting the brakes or slamming brakes or easing into the brakes, over time those pads are going to wear quicker than if you were driving around town at 15, 20 miles an hour, right?

Now, if you're doing local driving and you're stopping all the time, that may wear the pads down quicker too. So it can also vary. If you're a regular bike, you're braking more frequently than on an e-bike, you may wear those pads down quicker. The difference though is the caliper pads that are on the rims, the rubber pads, they're going to be thicker most times, right? They're going to have a lot more pads to them than the disc brake pad. So over time, you're just going to probably have more pads left on your brake. And now, depending if you are a road biker and you're traveling at high speeds or a lot of downhills, you may wear your pads pretty quickly as well, but I'm talking about recreational riders, and I think what's happening right now is recreational riders that went from regular bikes to e-bikes are wearing brakes down much quicker, and they're kind of wondering what's happening or why is that happening? Well, traveling at higher speeds, using those brakes more frequently, and the brake pads may be going down quicker than they were on your standard bike caliper rubber pads.

Now, a couple of things you need to know about. Because the brakes are so essential on an e-bike, you're traveling at 20 miles an hour and you need to stop very quickly, you want to make sure these brakes are very responsive. Now over time, as the pads inside your disc brakes wear down, the responsiveness of these brakes is going to get less because as the pad wears down, the pad is getting farther away from the rotor. I can just show you right here, let me go ahead and just turn this around and show you a couple of things here.

Now, on an e-bike, most of the time you will have a disc brake. And on a disc brake, you have what's called a rotor. And right here you have your caliper. The rotor goes inside the caliper, and inside the caliper on either side are pads. Those pads can actually be replaced and you can remove them and put new pads in. Those are, you can buy different types of pads, different qualities of pads, and different materials of the pads, and the replacement pads don't have to be purchased from your manufacturer because these disc brakes, a lot of them use similar pads and the disc brakes are usually, or are not produced by the manufacturer of the bike. They're their brands. In our case, we use a Tektro brand disc brake. You can find those pads, honestly, on Amazon or on the internet to replace them. And for your e-bike, you most likely can find them as well.

Now, you want to look at the general shape of them to make sure that they fit in. Now, I'm not going to get into the full details about how to change the disc brake or the pads. We're going to make another video for that. You can also find other videos on YouTube that fully explain how to change them. The point of this video is to generally explain that this is the one thing you have to know about and why.

So as those pads wear down, your brake lever here is going to get less responsive and you're going to have to pull more to brake the bike, to stop the bike, right? And so you're going to want to adjust your disc brake fairly frequently to make sure that the calipers are always staying tight enough to the rotor to give you the kind of responsiveness you need on an e-bike to be safe. If those brake pads get too far from the rotor and this lever comes all the way down, touching the grip while you're braking, that could be an unsafe situation where you can't break fast enough, depending on where you're riding or where you're going.

So one thing you can do, honestly if you start to feel the responsiveness of your brakes get looser and looser, you can take it into a bike shop, and have them take a look at it. Changing the disc brakes is something any bike shop can do. Doesn't matter if it's an e-bike or a regular bike, the disc brakes are going to be the same, or similar to standard bikes and e-bikes. It's a very similar product, the same actually in most cases.

And one thing you can do if you can't tell by the responsiveness is you can look inside your caliper here where the rotor is seated, and you can just quickly see how much pad is left. And if you also wanted to, you could take your front wheel off, and then you can even get a clearer shot in there to just take a look at, what do the pads look like in there? Are they worn down? Are there plenty of pads? And again, if they're a little bit worn, that's not a big deal, you're just going to want to make sure you adjust your caliper to bring them in closer to the rotor to get the responsiveness you need up here on the levers.

Now, I think that's something that a lot of new e-bike riders are just not made aware of is the idea that brake maintenance not only is a more important element, I mean again, still important for regular bikes, but even more important on e-bikes. And because of how much quicker they're going to wear on e-bikes, it's something that you will need to do maintenance on more frequently.

Now, I've heard every 100 miles you want to at least inspect the brakes. It also really depends on how you ride the bike. So I can't give a good ballpark on how frequently, but again, every time you ride, just give a quick visual down here. Make sure you've got enough pads and check your responsiveness, right? And if at any point during a ride, you feel that responsiveness going out, take a look. If the pads are worn down, take them to a bike shop. Or if you're comfortable and know how to do it yourself, go ahead and replace the pads. That'll be the safest way forward, as opposed to leaving them. You don't want to grind these pads down until they're nothing.

And again, replacing the cost of the actual pads, it's probably only a few dollars. I've seen other people posting on Amazon where they buy bags of 20 or 30 and it's like $10, $15, so I can't advocate for the quality that they're purchasing necessarily, but they're out there, it's affordable, it's a great thing you're going to want to keep up on to keep you safe. It's the one most important thing you have to know about.

So, any other questions on this topic or comments, please put them below or email us, at theteam@sixthreezero.com, or call us at (310) 982-2877. In addition to that, we've got our e-bikes linked in the description down below. If you want to check out the e-bike selection we have, we've got step-through frames, we've got three-wheel e-bikes, so go ahead and check those out. We also offer a 30-day test drive on your e-bike policy. If you don't love it in 30 days, send it back, no questions asked, no money out of your pocket. We're also going to warranty everything for a year.

And lastly, we have thousands of happy sixthreezero riders in our Facebook Pedalers group. Join the group, ask questions, and see how they like their sixthreezero bikes. Also, ask them about brake maintenance. They can help you out as well, how frequently they check them. Lots of riders in there to talk to. Also, once you have a sixthreezero, post photos, and make friends, it's tons of fun. Thanks for sticking around and don't forget, it's your journey, your experience. Enjoy the ride.