Low to mid-range turbo trainer advice

General Discussion
1

Morning all,

Recently taken up Zwift as a way to keep fit and thoroughly enjoying it so far. Having ridden nearly 400km over the last couple of weeks I am now debating upgrading my current turbo trainer. I am currently using an old CycleOps mag trainer which whilst it does the job, doesn’t give me a variable resistance and has a nice strong vibration with it that I’m sure isn’t doing my arms any good!

I had a look around at mid-range turbo trainers and from that I can see, for something under £250 I’m probably looking at the Tacx Bushido or Vortex.

The reviews on both seem pretty good from people that actually own them but middle of the road from professional reviewers. Is this because they aren’t (understandably) as good as the top end trainers the professionals are using or are they just not that good in general?

Has anyone got either and uses it on regular basis with Zwift that would be able to give any advice?

Cheers,

Paul

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I used a Vortex, until I got myself an H2 in December.
It does the job just fine, though it does top out at a certain incline percentage, 6% or something.
Not sure how noisy it is compared to your current trainer.
Most important issue is that its power accuracy varies quite a bit during intervals - so if you want to want to do workouts or a training plan, just be aware of that.

I’d say that if you can get the Bushido for a price close to the Vortex, rather go for it, of course.
Unfortunately anything better (Flux S, Elite Suito) is probably more than double the price. Maybe there are some new launches at Eurobike next month that brings down the prices.

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The Tacx Flow is also an option, available from Halfords for about £200. I have it, it’s a smart trainer and seems to work fine with Zwift. I have had issues with Zwift picking it up as a controllable trainer through Bluetooth on the Companion app, but looking around it seems like this should be fixed by using it with ANT+ instead, which I’ll be trying out for ZA today.

I looked at reviews for all 3 when I was looking at upgrading my turbo (started off with an ancient one I got off Facebook that barely worked but got me into Zwift :joy:). I ended up going with the Flow because at the time it was the cheapest of the 3 available and budget was my main concern. However, the Vortex seems to have gone down a lot in price, on Wiggle for £180ish. I’d say if you’re willing to fork out more, the Bushido would be the best option, if you want the cheapest, go with the Vortex, and if you want in-between, the Flow is good!

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