Charging on the go

Riding long distances with a GPS or a phone and you quickly run into problems of charge. How to keep the things charged up. Since my bike has a dynamo the obvious answer is to charge. Here there are a number of options. I chose the cycle2charge as it looked neat and was not outrageously expensive.

I ordered directly from http://www.cycle2charge.de via google translate and within a week it turned up.

Fitting was simple except routing the cable as my forks did not allow the cable to route out of the bottom of the fork crown as they are carbon. Fortunately it was simple to file a small notch in the top of the steerer through which the cable then routes.

Usage

Yesterday I got to try it out. It works but with one problem. Since it has no internal battery as you slow the charging stops. Not a problem when charging a phone but a significant one when charging a Garmin 810. Every time to looses USB power, even with auto shutdown turned off, the Garmin starts to shutdown giving 15 seconds warning. When we were cycling along a disused railway track, which being a standard UK cycle path was not tarmaced so muddy and not really suitable for a road bike slowing due to mud the Garmin would shutdown just when I was concentrating on controlling my bike I also had 15 seconds to prevent shutdown.

Using the cycle2power to charge a phone, battery or lights (I have a backup battery light for when the Dynamo can’t be used which charges over USB) works perfectly. It looks reasonably neat but only time will tell how it copes with the British weather. So far I would recommend.