Punctures and Flat tyres - how to avoid them and how to fix them!

All electric bikes have their moments and we are well versed in maintaining and repairing them in our workshop. After all these years though, the most common mechanical issue that can stop your ride in its tracks is a flat tyre. And it's even more painful on an e-bike because it is physically challenging to push a heavy bike with a flat tyre without ruining the bike's rim for your efforts!

What causes flat tyres on e-bikes?

1. Puncture - the main single cause of a puncture if a foreign object getting through the tyre and puncturing the inner tube. 
2. Pinch Flat - you can suffer a 'pinch flat' from hitting an unexpected bump too hard with suboptimally inflated tyres. This leaves a 'snakebite' double puncture in your tube
3. Inside job - your innertube can be punctured from below as well by some rogue rim tape or spoke.
4. Blow out - this is where the tyre loses its structure and cannot contain the tube. 
5. Innertube wear - if you ride your bike around with flat-ish tyres, the tube will eventually form a 'tiger stripe' pattern of diagonal streaks all around it inside. This wears away the tube and it becomes porous, losing air very slowly through each of these slits. Your tyres will wear prematurely too, forming a tell tale triangular shape all around.

Best ways to prevent punctures on your e-bike

Some modern tyres are extremely difficult to get off rims even for bike mechanics. Generally these are robust tyres fitted to very wide, tubeless-ready rims. Therefore, prevention is always better than a cure!

Looking at the list above you can see that the best ways to prevent flats from happening in the first place are:

• Purchase tyres with an appropriate level of puncture resistance and structural strength for your e-bike and the riding that you're doing. For Auckland roads consider Schwalbe Marathon Plus or Schwalbe Pickup. And if your bike doesn't suit those sorts of tyres or you don't like them, adding a Tannus Tyre Liner will help. 
• Keep your tyres inflated to the correct pressure by pumping regularly with a proper floor pump or compressor. Hand pumps are just for emergencies.

Tubeless vs Innertubes

By default, your e-bike has innertubes in it. Tubeless on the other hand, is more common amongst mountain bikes, often considered essential for very bumpy riding (hitting rocks, riding on barely formed tracks etc). There are also puncture prevention advantages to going tubeless for city commuting but there are some additional maintenance aspects to be learned by the user as well, which doesn't always suit our customer base. To be completely open, tubeless is not a strong point at EBT and we generally will setup your e-bike with tubes unless requested otherwise.

Fixing a puncture

To get riding again, you either need to repair the innertube with a patch kit or replace the innertube. This means somehow getting the bike to our workshop (via AA rescue if you're a member) or doing it yourself. To do it yourself, the following will help:

• Carry a spare tube, patch kit, tyre levers and pump with you, plus any tools that you need to remove your wheel. See our tools here.
• This is the easy way to turn a heavy e-bike upside down (mind the display).
• You don't have to remove your wheel to fix a puncture. See our explainer video here and in real life.
  
• You can learn to fix your own e-bike at this one day course.

Silver bullets, short cuts and back up plans

There's certainly no good reason to put up with regular punctures on your e-bike. The right tyres and/or tyre liners and pumping regularly will see most people through. However, sometimes punctures will happen! These are some things that you might like to know. 

• There is such a pressurised puncture repair spray that does what it claims. However it doesn't claim much - about 3km of riding before it's flat again. Still, not a bad thing to have up your sleeve in an urban context, where 3km might be enough to get to home/work/us or somewhere more safe and pleasant to plan your next move. 
• The AA does bike pickups for their members. Given you'll be waiting a little while, it combines well with the repair spray above so you can pick your waiting spot. 
• Solid tyres do exist. Chrissy did her 1000 mile Brompton ride on a pair. However, they make your bike noticeably harder to ride and control, so we wouldn't recommend them except in the most exceptional cases.
• Carry a bike lock and some cash/cards/phone. You might have to abandon your bike due to a puncture so that you can carry on to an urgent appointment or similar. Your options look a lot better with a lock.