How often to service your bike (analog and eBike)

A customer walks into the shop saying "it was fine yesterday." It almost never is. A chain that skips, brakes that need an extra half-second to bite, a derailleur that won't sit right on a gear anymore — these are the last chapter of wear that's been building for months. Regular bike service is exactly what catches that wear before it turns into a breakdown, or worse, an accident on the road. There's no single answer to "how often," because it depends on mileage, riding conditions, and, increasingly, on whether the bike is analog or e-assisted.

The practical rule: mileage and months

For a regularly ridden analog bike, the baseline is a check every 1,000-1,500 km or every 6 months, whichever comes first. That's roughly the point where chain and pads show measurable wear, cables settle in, and headsets or hub bearings start drifting out of their ideal adjustment. Daily commuters riding through rain and grit should tighten that interval — winter grime and road salt chew through chains and seals far faster than pure mileage suggests. Weekend riders can stretch it, but not past 12 months: a bike ages even sitting still, with tyres drying out and hydraulic fluid slowly absorbing moisture.

The cheapest and most effective habit, though, is the pre-ride check before any serious outing: tyre pressure, brake bite, headset play, main bolt torque. It's the five-minute check every rider should be able to do solo, and what we call a pre-check on the shop floor.

What actually changes with an eBike

On an eBike, the service conversation changes weight — literally. The extra mass of motor, battery and reinforced frame, combined with the torque the motor delivers, puts far more stress on chain, cassette and especially brakes than an analog bike ever sees; it's not unusual for pads and rotors to wear at roughly double the rate. That's why the recommended interval on an eBike drops to 800-1,000 km or 4-6 months, with brakes worth checking independently even more often than that.

Then there's the electrical side an analog bike simply doesn't have: motor firmware updates, checking battery contacts (moisture is enemy number one), verifying remaining capacity and overall cell health. It's no coincidence that eBikes now account for roughly three-quarters of the bikes coming in for repair: motor and battery issues have made warranty handling the trickiest operational problem in service today, because an electrical fault needs to be tracked and documented very differently from a mechanical one.

Minimum service vs. full service

It's worth separating the two, because customers often lump them together and they're not the same job. A minimum service covers the drivetrain (chain, cassette, derailleurs), brakes (pads, rotors or rim pads, bleeding if needed) and tyre pressure/wear — this is what should happen at the interval above. A full service adds headset and bottom bracket inspection, hub overhaul (bearings, play), wheel truing, and on eBikes, electronic motor diagnostics plus a battery test. It's worth doing once a year even on a lightly used bike, because some components — seals, ball bearings, connectors — degrade with time regardless of how many kilometres were actually ridden.

The reminder: the piece that almost always goes missing

The reason a service gets skipped is almost never customer laziness — it's the lack of a reminder. If a shop logs the date and rough mileage of the last visit, setting an automatic prompt for the next check is trivial, rather than waiting for the customer to remember on their own (which, in practice, almost never happens). It's a small shift in approach, but it's the difference between a customer who comes back with a problem already underway and one who comes back early, for prevention — and the second case costs less for everyone involved.

If you run a shop and want to keep service dates, repair history and customer reminders under control without chasing scattered spreadsheets, CrankPal is built for exactly this kind of everyday service work.