Here we'll discuss :

• Distance
• Calculate energy required
• Finding the appropriate batteries to assemble the pack
• Charging time

I'll share my rationale and process. You could apply a similar approach by changing a few parameters to adapt to your case.

First, knowing how much is sufficient is the core business. Let's start with distance. Ask your preferred map provider the raw distance of your commute. Keep that in mind and use this geographically less featured calculator :

http://www.electricbikerange.info/Electric_bike_ra...

Which also considers elevation gain. As this if for light bikes, make sure to specify a higher weight for your motorcycle. On the calculator, I got 6 Ah needed to go one way on my 60v battery pack. So the full commute will need 12 Ah.

As usual, don't consider that this is all you'll need as there are always losses and safety reserves that are good to exist.

Once you get fluent with these measurements of capacity, I found pretty helpful to translate the battery pack capacity to Wh. It's a much more comparable unit. Just multiply your Ah capacity and the pack voltage. I got ~960 Wh.

It's much easier to compare to other electric vehicles and get a real world feeling on energy spent per mile. For example, I found that electric scooters should consume about 60 Wh per mile, given that electric bikes do much less and performance motorcycles do about 80 Wh per mile. This is a great ballpark value. use it to compare to your numbers from the calculator.

Going to the physical world, I found a pretty good deal in hobbyking.com for a 16 Ah 4S battery :

Specs :

Minimum Capacity: 16000mAh

Configuration: 4S2P / 14.8V / 4

CellConstant Discharge: 10C

Peak Discharge (10sec): 20C

Pack Weight: 1290gPack Size: 173 x 74 x 45mm

Charge Plug: JST-XH

Discharge Plug: XT90

The link will eventually break, but here it is :

https://hobbyking.com/en_us/multistar-high-capacit...

I got 4 of these for $50 each. Pretty good deal, total of $200 for the entire LiPo pack. That's rare and that's one of the reasons I wanted to go for a Hobby pack based design. It sells a lot and you can find spares and deals much more easily.

That gives me the 16S I need, once I connect the 4 packs in series. It also allows me to disassemble the 16S pack into the smaller 4S ones and use a standard model plane 300W charger, which is what I did during all the testing period, before I bought the 16S no balancing charger.

I don't think we even need to discuss current capacity here. Lead acid would need a lot of care. But using LiPo is just cheating. Peukert's law doesn't apply and if we're going for 16 Ah, 10C is 160 A , double than our maximum current. So you just need to be aware that your acceleration peaks are under the 10C (or higher) battery spec.

For charging, you will usually will do pretty well charging at 1C in 1h. I preferred going the safer route and got a 5A charger for my 16Ah pack, which will give me roughly 3h charging time.

For chargers, Aliexpress and the next step's BMS suppliers are pretty ok. I'm sure there are better ones, let me know in the comments!

I'll fast forward to the current draw tests and let you have a bit of fun on how that turned out in the garage.