The bike is the best invention, right? I don’t think many people here will argue that, but if you were struggling to think what the next best invention is, well you are looking at it, the dynamo hub. I have been using the dynamo hub now for a long time, I first used one when I cycled around the coast of mainland Britain, and thank god I did because after the first day I lost the power bank I was carrying and just charged my phone directly into the dynamo the whole way around the coast, yes it does work and yes it’s not the fastest way to charge your phone, it is like plugging it into a laptop USB port, and as batteries have got bigger it takes even longer nowadays. Back then, it was an iPhone 4s I was charging, and it used to take anywhere from 3 to 5 hours to get it fully charged. You soon start resenting people who want to call you, and you see that 20% battery drain, wondering how long it will take to recharge that, another 10 miles maybe even 30.

Since I first used one though I knew it was a game changer for me and quite frankly I have them on all my bikes now because it means I don’t need to pop into pubs or stop at the campsites to get a quick charge of my phone or Garmin. Don’t get me wrong, you still need to be mindful of your power consumption if you have lots of gadgets on the go, but for me the main thing I like it for is the unlimited Garmin GPS power. Connect it also to the lights, and you can ride forever, day and night.

In terms of how you connect it to your phone or Garmin you will need the converter, there are a couple of major ones round nowadays and none of them are particularly cheap, I’m currently using the sin wave revolution (it came with my bomb track beyond plus bike) It’s a pretty simple but works great. But this type of converter is the type that when you stop moving or don’t move fast enough About 4-5mph is about enough to get it to kick in you will instantly lose power so it can start to actually use more power of the device its charging if it keeps charging then not charging. Wouldn’t worry about it too much nowadays, though, modern GPS units have decent and small batteries that don’t take all that much power to charge. I am normally able to keep the Garmin 830 between 90-100% over most trips I go on with it constantly connected, as well as having it connected to the lights (exposure revo/Red eye) The other type of converter has a built-in battery (just a little one) so if you stop for a couple of minutes or so down so much you can’t produce the power, it won’t stop charging the one I used before was the Busch & Muller USB-Werk i actually really like this one maybe even a little more than the sin wave, however the issue with something with a built-in battery is when it dies the whole thing doesn’t work Busch & Muller dont seem to have a way to get a replacement battery, i’m sure it can be replaced, but you will need to source the batter from somewhere then reseal the unit etc. They do last ages though but if you think you will go through phases of using it for a while then leaving it in storage then the sinwave is probably a better option, because it’s really when you stop using it is when the internal battery will degrade and fail. There are alternatives to these two, but these are the most common and although not cheap are cheaper than a lot of the others on the market.

And yes you can run both at the same time, you can go down the route of having a kind of switch made so you can choose which one you want to run at any given time, or you can use the secret method of just wrapping both cables around each other. And since I want to run lights and charge the GPS at the same time, I just use this method most of the time. In the summer, when I don’t really need the lights to be running all the time, I sometimes separate them and cable tie one of the plugs to the outside of the fork.

There are lots of hubs on the market now no longer do you need to spend £££ on SON hubs, I use the SP (Shutter precision) hubs, and they have always been great for me, that red one in the picture is the one I cycled the coast of Britain with, and it still works it’s not quite as smooth nowadays, but I predict its got about 10,000+ miles on it, the only reason its not on a bike is that its quick release. SP can service these hubs for you and from memory when I last looked it was only about £20-£30 to do so, the catch is you need to de build your wheels to send them the hub so depending on if you can’t do that yourself it might not be worth it. But it’s good that it can be done as dynamo hubs are always a sealed unit to keep the elements out (that’s why they normally last a long time) But the downside has always been they are not serviceable.

The Dynamo, the second-best invention since the bicycle

not WAHOO Element Roam