Hi all,
I have really enjoyed using my run pod over the past week or so and the Zwift experience has been every bit as good as I had hoped it would be.
I am due to receive delivery of a Peloton bike on Wednesday this week but asking the million dollar question of how I pair this up to Zwift.
I have read some articles but as I am a newbie I didn’t understand the complexity and if I can use effectively both ‘apps’ easy enough without any changing of software or hardware.
Please can some guidance be given, I would appreciate your help and advice.
Thanks,
Stewart
Finally good luck to all the marathon runners today.
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Send it back and get a smart bike 
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I’m somebody who is also in this position. I’ve had the Peloton Bike+ for almost two weeks, and during this time I’ve done a lot of reading on using it with Zwift, and other cycling apps. A lot.
Dave’s post to DC Rainmaker’s article will give you tons of details, but the short answer is you will need to purchase power pedals, which are a couple hundred dollars. You then pair the power pedals to Zwift (whether using the Peloton tablet following the article, or another tablet or PC), and away you go.
There is no way currently to control resistance of the Peloton bike while using Zwift (because in this scenario, Zwift only is connected to the pedals), so while using Zwift you must control resistance yourself with the knob, even with a Bike+. This takes away from the Zwift experience a lot as well, though it is better than nothing.
I would ask where your priorities are. Yes, you can get power pedals and use the Peloton in Zwift, but you are paying a lot of money for a less than stellar Zwift experience. On the other hand, if you get a smart bike (one example being the Stages SB20), you can get full support of Zwift, Trainer Road and many other applications since smart bikes and apps use open standards, and at the same time you can still subscribe to the Peloton digital app to get their classes! You won’t have automatic resistance control for Peloton though because they don’t use open standards, nor will you be able to appear in Peloton leaderboards, but you can still go through all of the classes and be a part of that community as well.
Since the bike is coming tomorrow you might as well take delivery the bike and enjoy it. If you change your mind on what is more important, you always have Peloton’s 30-day return policy to take advantage of if you wanted to switch to other hardware.
Enjoy!
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There is also an ‘overkill’ workaround (if you can’t side-load Zwift onto the Peloton+)
- Peloton+ Bike
- Power meter pedals
- PC / Mac / Laptop / iPad / etc to run Zwift as ‘normal’
If you are the only user of the Peloton bike, i would be asking myself ‘what else will i be gaining from the Peloton?’ If the answer is ‘not much’, then i’d be looking at a bike / turbo setup.
If you’re in a similar situation as myself - with multiple users of the Peloton; and only room for one trainer setup - then the Peloton is a good solution.
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Please can you elaborate on the turbo set up - I will be the sole user.
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You want me to explain what i used when i had a turbo trainer? Mine was very, very basic!
- Canyon Ultimate CF SL road bike (that i also use outdoors - it’s my only bike)
- Tacx NEO 1st Generation
That’s it! The rest is tech. I didn’t need a power meter (the Neo was the source for power and cadence when connecting to Zwift). I used a Bluetooth HRM.
I started with running Zwift on my MacBook Pro, and it was totally fine. At one point, i wanted better graphics 
So built a PC and got an Ant+ dongle (because i had a lot of issues connecting the sensors via Bluetooth to my PC)
But there are are some crazy setups out there! People with lots of space, and money. I would love to have a dedicated bike that i could leave setup on a turbo trainer - but that is not going to happen for me right now.
Do a Google search for ‘Zwift Pain Cave’ and you’ll find some amazing setups.
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