So glad I avoided electric shifting in favour of Ultegra .... I have enough battery issues with the phones, GPS's and power tools in my life.
LOL, I agree full heartedly! I use nothing but mechanical derailleurs and I have no issues with them, not even my one bike that has over 150,000 miles on the mechanicals. But my battery stuff...the bats don't last long on my phone, rear tail light, headlight (which I just bought new bats for it) or my GPS, about a year and half is what I get from those and then I have to replace the bats. Now my power tools have been different, but I think that may be due to the size of the batteries being used, but my bat powered weed eater and drill bats are all over 5 years old and going strong. The weird thing with the weed whacker is the original battery was a smaller battery, at the time I bought the thing I got an extra battery that was larger, the larger battery works fine but the smaller one lasts about 1/2 as long as it did when it was new, and both got used equally. I'm not sure what is going on with these batteries but it seems the smaller the battery the shorter the life expectancy. But knowing what I know about the current crop of rechargeable bats I would never buy a bike with electronic shifting; I ride into remote areas and the last thing I want is a dead battery along the ride and be forced to use one gear all the way back home; add on top of that all the issues I've heard from my bike shop about software glitches...it's just a no brainer for me. Though one of my original concerns in regards to servo motor failure hasn't seemed to materialized yet, but maybe not enough miles have been put on them yet for that to be determined, but those servos do account for the fast shifting especially the front derailleur is much improved over the mechanical front derailleurs. So while the servo motors seem to be robust, the software issues and the battery issues are not. Then there is this weird issue:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rl0j4XYgmVs
Some will argue that mechanical systems while cheaper initially will cost more over the long haul due to maintenance, over 150,000 miles I have on a mechanical system and the only maintenance I've had is lubing pivots, replacing cables which seem to last about 30,000 miles for me, but if batteries will only last a couple of years and cost around $100 for one that's more then a set of cables cost at around $12 a set if you replace those every couple of years though I get a lot longer than 2 years out of my cables.
The old Nicad bats lasted a lot longer, I got 15 to 18 years out of those, but they didn't pack enough voltage and amp hrs so tools using those didn't have the power that people wanted, and if they could the battery would have been huge and heavy.
The one thing I learned about these new batteries is that you need to charge it fully after every use even if you used only say 5% of the battery; if you wait say after many uses and the bat is down below 50% it won't last as long, and running them down all the way is really bad for them. So keep them fully charged at all times. If I had a electronic system I would not follow the instructions of charging it once a month, I would charge it after every ride, I think the battery should last longer if you keep it topped off. If some argue about the life expectancy of those bats SRAM even admits that 2 years is all they'll last; see:
https://sram.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/207513357-How-long-do-the-shifter-batteries-last- And I assume that's IF the owner charges it according to their directions, but if the owner gets lazy and charges it when the battery is down to 10% remaining then the owner may only get a year out of it. Nowadays with these newer bats I try to keep them topped off but the cell phone is impossible to do that since I have to use it all during the day and charge it up at night so by the time I get to charge it it's down around 50% which isn't good which is why the battery use to only drop down to around 70% when I first got it, this battery is less then a year old, but had I been able to charge it when it only dropped to say 10% it may be a better battery today, but I know this battery won't last another 6 months. Here is some important but a lot of technical reading on Li-Po bats:
https://rogershobbycenter.com/lipoguide/
