Hello, I do no exercise, and I’ve no desire to go running, or out on a bike in the cold, wet and dark UK winter. Working from home has not helped. I think I should probably change my habits!
I do have a Reebok Jet100 bike which has been used twice. It has magnetic resistance control.
I’d like to try Zwift to see if I can get motivated. I believe a power meter would be better than a cadence sensor and have found the Avio Powersense product as the cheapest example. Would this be the best thing to get started with please? I know I won’t get resistance control back from Zwift.
The Avio Powersense looks like a crank-based power meter, installing one of those on an exercise bike is difficult or impossible. Your best option is probably a pedal-based power meter such as the Assioma or Garmin (single-sided around 400 quid/bucks/euro). You do need a pair of compatible cycling shoes to use with the pedals, and you definitely need to make sure the pedals are compatible with the cranks (standard 9/16" threads).
Thank you. If you don’t mind me asking, why is installing the Avio meter difficult on an exercise bike? Are there any that may work?
I will look into the pedals, however at 400 + shoes that seems to be getting into indoor trainer pricing? I do have a 20 year old Raleigh mountain type bike I could maybe use with a trainer, but it would all take up more room and means I’d need another bike for outside.
Maybe I should just start with a cheap Wahooo cadence sensor on the exercise bike. At least that’ll get me going?
A crank-based powermeter is just that, a complete crankset (chainset), and it works together a compatible bottom bracket and chainrings. There are many different standards there for these parts used by bicycles of the mobile kind, yet probably none of them are compatible with an exercise bike.
The first picture I found for this particular model showed something looking a lot like a variant of an Ashtabula (one-piece) crankset, used only in low-end bicycles and not really much even there in this century. Also, with such cranks, 1/2" pedal threads are not uncommon, hence the warning in my earlier message.
A cadence sensor by itself won’t work with Zwift. However, I guess you could install a speed sensor on the flywheel and tweak the parameters to get you started.
I think the Avio meter can be mounted to an existing crank. I’ll email them and ask them if it is compatible. I guess it just needs a long enough straight section on the crank? I can unbolt each crank on the bike.
Aside from the fact that this power meter wasn’t designed to work on the Reebok Jet 100, the fact that their website generates this web page is not a good indication:
@A_7346735: Anna’s advice is solid. As long as your exercise bike is compatible with standard cycling pedals, you can get a good, reliable, and accurate platform to use with Zwift by just adding power meter pedals and the cycling shoes to go with them.
Here’s a bit more of a technically oriented explanation. A power meter measures how much you bend the cranks. Every crankarm is different, and it will bend a different amount under the same force. And there are quite a few crankarms in service. If you’re making power meters for standard Shimano crankarms, you probably have to do at least 3 models (the major 3 road groups), but then you have the gravel groups (also 3 slightly different crankarms). You might decide you want to forget about SRAM users, since they already have Quarq’s PMs, and you might decide to forget about Campagnolo since nobody uses Campagnolo anymore. Nevertheless, you might want to think about those guys, and there are still third party crankarms to think about.
Exercise bikes don’t use standard cycling cranks. So, a power meter manufacturer would need to go and see what types of crankarms are mounted to those bikes, and then figure out a) if it could be worth their business, and b) can they physically mount a sensor pod on the arms? To the second point, in cycling, a lot of crankarms have this nice flat surface to which you can bond the strain gauge pod. The crankarms on exercise bikes might not. To the first point, I don’t know how many models of crank are typically found, but for each one, a manufacturer would have to go and determine how much a known weight bends the arm. So it’s not just bonding the sensor pod onto the arm, there’s some empirical testing. For each model.
And I’m probably oversimplifying a bit, but I suspect this is pretty close to the truth. You avoid all that with pedal power meters. I mean, you could email Stages or 4iiii and see if they would consider this.
