Sorry for the long delay – been away a lot and not had time to invest in the project itself or the website.

I left the grid-powered battery charger trickling juice into the battery for about 48-hours. Battery voltage went up to 12.35 or so.  I checked it over the subsequent days and it seemed to hold around the number. Then I got very busy and did quite a bit of travelling… but now, over a month later, the battery voltage has dropped only marginally to 12.27v.

That suggests the issue is NOT with the battery.

So I’m left now to try and figure out whether:

1. I just didn’t put in enough pedalling for long enough. After all I had deliberately drained the battery to ‘inverter-cut-off-alarm’ so maybe it was just that more pedalling was needed than I thought (mind you the general belief is that when you can get the input charge up to 14.5 volts the battery is as charged as it can be*).
2. there’s something amiss with the rectifiers or something else within the turbike unit itself.

It might take a while before Eirbyte.com are able to visit with their fancy testing gear. So maybe in the coming weeks I’ll drain the battery a small bit (maybe charge a laptop) and then see if I can pedal-recharge it back up to 12.3volts. If it stays there then the issue was a pedalling deficiency 😉

But if it drops then there’s something wrong with the turbike’s electrics.

* But maybe that theory isn’t quite accurate and I just needed to do more pedalling?