New ibike user, old ibike model
Posted: Mon Sep 21, 2009 11:39 pm
I have one of the older wireless ibike models (red button on top) that I have been using for a couple months now. I'm not sure how accurate it is (have nothing to compare it to) but it seems to work ok. There seems to be all kinds of calibration requirements with the newer models and I guess the reason for this is better accuracy. I'm not sure what more I can do with my old model to make it more accurate. There doesn't seem to be any calibration ride feature that I see so many references to in this forum. Anyway, as I said it seems to work ok and I would like to believe that the power output I've been getting is fairly accurate. The only time that the readings started to go out of control was after I put my racing wheels on. I should have probably done a new calibration but I didn't and I noticed that the wattage was a bit higher than usual. Despite the fact that I was riding faster with my racing wheels I didn't feel as though I was generating that much more power as the power output was indicating. However, the power readings started to shoot up even more after a few rides and I began ignoring it and focused more on my HR output rather than on the real-time power output. I would then download my rides to my computer and the iBike application would analyze the ride data and adjust the power readings to make them seemingly more accurate. I use the "just analyze without a profile" option.
Recently I did a 9-mile time trial. It was the 3rd stage of a 5 stage race for cat 4 & 5 riders over 30. Since I had not yet fixed the problem with the ambiguous power readings I focused primarily on keeping my HR above 170 bpm. I totally ignored the power reading as it was too high to be considered accurate. This was to be my first attempt at maintaining such a high HR for such a long distance. In the end my average HR was 169.4 bpm and my average speed was 26.2 mi/h. I had the fastest time and totally impressed myself and everyone else. The ibike software analyzed my average power to be 332 W. This is far and beyond what I thought I was capable of and I am wondering how accurate this figure might be.
Is there anything else I can do to improve the accuracy of the real-time power readings?
Recently I did a 9-mile time trial. It was the 3rd stage of a 5 stage race for cat 4 & 5 riders over 30. Since I had not yet fixed the problem with the ambiguous power readings I focused primarily on keeping my HR above 170 bpm. I totally ignored the power reading as it was too high to be considered accurate. This was to be my first attempt at maintaining such a high HR for such a long distance. In the end my average HR was 169.4 bpm and my average speed was 26.2 mi/h. I had the fastest time and totally impressed myself and everyone else. The ibike software analyzed my average power to be 332 W. This is far and beyond what I thought I was capable of and I am wondering how accurate this figure might be.
Is there anything else I can do to improve the accuracy of the real-time power readings?