Advice Needed!

[swannmatt]

Morning folks, I hope this question is okay for this part of the forum. I need a little advice;

I have a Haibike Trekking 8.0 with a Yamaha PW-ST and Haibike Simplo 630wh downtube battery. Its been run pretty hard with a de-restrictor on it, it is about 3 years old and must have done around 7000miles.

I've found recently that the bike will, seemingly randomly, switch off completely with no visible error message. If I wait a while or disconnect and re-connect the battery it will usually then run again fine (sometimes it takes a few attempts).

For context, the battery lock operates in two stages, when you twist the key forward, the battery will drop half way, then twist key back to remove the battery entirely. This is done to stop the battery just dropping straight out when turning the key.

It seems like a dead battery. However, the odd thing is, if I run the bike with battery in the partially released state (as above) it appears to run fine, although I haven't tried this for long distances incase the battery falls out completely.

I thought it was the battery having dead cells until I discovered the above "battery half out" thing, which now makes me think maybe its a connection issue. On the flip side, I can ride it with the battery locked fully in place down a really bumpy hill and smash the bike about and it won't cut out, it seems like speed and distance are a contributing factor.

Haibike have been fairly useless and just say "Buy a new battery". I've e-mailed some local places and they say the same. I don't have an easily accessible Haibike specialist, any thoughts?

 

[Philly G]

Have you tried cleaning the contacts, you can buy a spray for just this purpose, strange it runs fine with the battery partially out, this was all I could think of

 

[swannmatt]

Have you tried cleaning the contacts, you can buy a spray for just this purpose, strange it runs fine with the battery partially out, this was all I could think of

Thanks for the reply!

I did try blasting some air into both connections. I bit the bullet and bought a new battery and it now works great again. Its sad there is no good way of getting the battery repaired as it still holds a charge really well, it must have a dodgy connection or a bad cell which is telling the battery computer to shut down at certain points.

I've contacted a few places and they won't touch this kinda downtube battery.

 

[Philly G]

Glad you got the problem sorted ! Shame you had to get a new battery though. A spray cleaner such as this would do a more thorough job than just compressed air, if you need to clean your contacts in the future https://www.bunnings.co.nz/crc-210m...FsAj81qvQ6w-f3AVNh0aAma0EALw_wcB&gclsrc=aw.ds

 

[BIG-DUKE-6]

Try some conductivity contact gel