I look at it as an investment. Not a cheap purchase, but it will certainly improve & make my indoor/winter training more pleasurable.
As to the PC setup, I got a couple of good deals on the MM which helped.
Combined with spares lying around & b grade from Overclockers I think the whole machine cost me £265
Not bad! Yeah you're right about it being an investment, the way I justified mine was think ~100 a year spent on indoor trainers, so I've gotta keep the Flux 5 years at least before I'm allowed to change it again! In the 4 years before then I'd bought 2 trainers lol...
Paid £390 for my Asus X550LB (i5 4200, 4gb RAM) without OS, put Win7 on it, free upgrade to W10 and switched the HDD to a SSD I already had. 128gb but is starting to run low on space so really need to think about upgrading it (or get the other half to put her holiday photos elsewhere!). I bought it because it had a GPU - Geforce 740M 2gb is ok, but struggles a little at 1080p on Zwift with lots of riders on screen. Runs fine at 720p, but that looks damn ugly now I'm running it on a 36" TV...
@Roady im trying wattsboard but also using Veloviewer now - £10 year sub and imports everything from Strava working out ftp etc - seems well worth it for the amount of data it spits out!
I use Zwift on my iPad, does the pc version do anything differently outside of bigger screen options obv!?
Veloviewer and Strava Summit are the only cycling 'data' subscriptions I currently pay so feel your pain. Training Peaks was ace but far too expensive and has far too much in there for me...
Although I'm a bit old school so would only really get my FTP from a specific FTP Test. There's too many variables otherwise. Yes, it's nice to have it estimated, but with it being quite a key metric for training against (or racing with in my case) I'd prefer it to be as accurate as possible. I guess I'm just not doing huge long 20+ minute efforts. The Zwift race above was an exception and before I've
used the Alpe as an FTP test,
have even done a 20 minute FTP test up there, then a few minutes rest before extending it up the total climb (which is an hour for me). It worked well, hurt like hell, so was fantastic training! Maybe need to revisit that...
Apple/iPads have the iOS app which is slightly different. Some releases and things are a little behind and there's the limit of 2 concurrent BT devices (and only BT). So once you've a smart trainer connected and HRM, you can't have additional PWM/Cadence etc without something else to combine data streams. Also can only use BT sensors, a few years back there where hardly any BT HRM's (before Wahoo TICKR). PC there's not the same limits, BT & ANT+ from a £20 USB dongle. Think you can get ANT+ dongles for iOS devices but unsure if that gets around the data stream limit.
@BennyC is sending me an ANT+ dongle to try out so we'll see if that improves it otherwise I'll be contacting Tacx.
I did notice that when it happens it smells hot which is odd as I'm not feeling more resistance.
Really looks like a failure/faulty unit, wouldn't expect the dongle to solve it, but would be nice if it did. I'll say the unit is faulty, especially with the warm/burning smell. It's not uncommon.
) and made a much more conscious effort to keep cadence up and it happened again when I hit the 280w ramp. cadence was kept steady around 85 and power started dropping and cadence reading on zwift went up but I wasn't pedalling any faster . I let the power drop completely to turn ERG off and as soon as it came back off and I was pedalling normally again the same thing happened although the cadence readout definitely seemed to stay incorrect (reading too high).
but you can see the power slowly drop off just after ramping up while I kept pedalling then drops to zero when I stopped.
