Everyone has different living arrangements, and even if you have the same model of home, you’ve probably configured your pain-cave/wattage-cottage differently.
I get a lot of new ideas seeing how people have adapted living spaces to accommodate Zwift. I think there’s merit in collecting them somewhere - not for bragging rights but to give everyone ideas on optimizing theirs.
Sharing with the class… I’m lucky enough to have a dedicated home office in my apartment and by keeping the desk footprint compact, I have room to set up the bike with a smart trainer. Instead of a side table, I’ve got some magnetic wall storage bins/shelves I can keep ride food/drink on, and a tablet holder for the handlebars with a tray for the smartphone.
I’m considering adding a 32” TV on a wall mount freeing up the tablet for something like ZwiftGPS.com or ZwiftMap.com while I’m riding.
For super long rides: I’ve installed a USB-C socket on the wall and can run a cord to keep the tablet powered up, or a USB-hub to keep both the tablet and smartphone powered up. (this would be for “PRL Full” type rides that are long enough to deplete a tablet’s battery)
My recommendation would be to get a TV mount on wheels I recently set up Zwift for my brother with this setup on ATV much easier to alter your room layout if required than having TV mounted to the wall like I have.
I set my parents up with a TV cart like that! They were super skeptical at first but they’ve taken to it and can wheel it in front of their smart bike, the treadmill, couch. Gets my vote.
Cool thread. I am set up in the garage so I can run a big fan…even in the summer at 90+ degrees (F). I have tried indoors but my fan is so noisy it is not compatible with riding indoors.
So I am interested in high output fans that do not make a lot of noise.
We live in a 2 bedroom high rise condo. I recently relented and agreed that we should turn our guest bedroom into a bike training room. My husband and I both ride and we don’t have children. Guests maybe 5 nights a year. It’s not complete yet but so far it’s amazing! I expect it will be done in a week and I’ll have to remember to post pictures here. 2 trainers each with a screen, lots of storage so all workout clothes can be kept in there, multiple fans, a Sonos speaker, and decor is on me.
Chris: I’m using the Wahoo Kickr Headwind fan. It’s obscenely expensive but I would absolutely spend the money again and recommend one: sync’d to your HR, it’ll ramp the speed up and down. It’s not silent but the column of air it pumps out is so concentrated you don’t need to run it at full blast.
I’m in a similar situation - apartment with second bedroom. It used to be reserved for guests and I eventually started re-evaluating how much of my home was allocated for relatively infrequent things. Ditched a tonne of clutter, turned the second bedroom into the office/pain-cave. Guests can sleep on the couch. (which is quite comfortable, fortunately for them!)
We could have written this. We pay for the whole space and that whole area was hardly ever used. The extra storage we created was insane.
And we have the Watopia map poster! Arrived this week. It’s in the frame and waiting to be hung on the wall.
The Pain Cave/Wattage Cottage/Cycling Studio is pretty much complete. Hubby and I have enjoyed our fist few rides together. Love this room way more than our old guest room!
Very nice Michelle! Seems like you’ve got a lot of space to work with.
I just made a change to my cave today - got a hand-me-down 32" LED TV and wall mount. The iPad on the handlebars was nice (and compact) but I’d like to see what it’s like with the game farther away.
You could say that my set-up is an exercise in making the most of a very small space.
Wall to wall (bike-length wise), it’s only 2m22cm (7ft 3in?). When I’m not riding, the fan is stored just out of the way to let me walk from my bathroom to my kitchen.
A few items I’ve made in the three years since I started zwifting:
I built a variable angle ‘foot’ for the fan unit to have it as close to me as possible while still pointing in exactly the direction that cools me the most when backed up against a wall. Wahoo designed it with just two angle settings and advise having it much farther away from the rider, but I don’t have the space.
The screen stand is made from heavy, galvanized steel pipe and various connectors, plus a combination of mic-stand and boom arm components, ending in a VESA plate for the screen. I couldn’t use a wall-mount unit due to lack of space and none of the commercially available stands took up as little floor space or would allow my front wheel to move (steering), so the design was just borne out of necessity.
The galvanized pipe and connectors are sold locally for making quirky furniture and not for construction scaffolding, but they are extremely dense, making this one massive boat anchor. There’s no screen wobble, despite it being on a relatively thin wooden-joisted floor in an old building. I cut all the pipe to length with a simple, manual pipe cutter and a few hours of sweating at a workbench. Not very elegant, but it does the job. (I had my iPad mounted on a K&M tablet holder on top of the boom arm before I went ATV and now PC.)
A final but very important part of my apartment set-up are the cheap, heavy rubber mats sold to go under washing machines to absorb vibrations. I cut some to size for my needs, with three layers under my KICKR and one under the Sterzo Smart. With some additional thin layers of foam rubber added in between here and there, I was able to get the front and back axles to exactly the same height off the ground.
Ha, my setup is so much worse than everyone else’s. I’m literally using the cardboard boxes my kickr core came with as my table top to hold my iPad. Maybe I’ll get a table someday.
Ah, but that’s the important point in all of this: the only thing that matters, really, is getting on the pedals and riding, right? It doesn’t matter what gear and what space we use, as long as they don’t get in the way of logging on and getting a sweat on. From the sounds of your BMU thread info, you’ve got the right priorities.
First, since switching from the iPad on the Tacx handlebar mount to the TV on the wall (it’s now a 4k OLED, total overkill - I love it), I took the upper part of the tablet mount off and it still works great just to hold the cell phone:
Maybe I’ll add it to the b-day wishlist - My amazing “cardboard box mount” also holds nutrition and remote controls, so I’d have to shift things around a bit I think
They were a lot cheaper (like $65) when I got mine last year, but it’s still a lot cheaper than the Wahoo fan and probably better. It’s not silent but I think it’s quiet enough to use indoors… but I usually ride with earbuds and don’t hear it at all.
A Watopia Wall Map is on my radar for the Zwift room: 
