Hi,
I bought a set of Garmin Vector pedals back in February and have had several issues trying to calibrate them properly. Can anyone advise me as I am now getting so fed up and thinking of selling them and buying an SRM! I thought I'd try here as one last attempt to get them to work.
I recently went on holiday with them after thinking I'd finally got the power right (by comparing figures to a friend of mine's who rode the same Strava segment and weighed the same as me and both of us having calibrated wattage against turbo-trainers, mine being a CycleOps Power Beam Pro). After coming back, I fitted them and torqued them to 34Nm (and also tried 40Nm) using a torque wrench, I updated the software on my Garmin Edge 800 and checked crank length was correctly set at 172.5 and also using the Garmin Vector updater to update software and also check crank length. I then went for a ride and again found the power figures really low (for one slight uphill segment it was 324watts, whereas prior to the holiday, nearly exactly the same speed on same segment showed my average wattage 406 watts, and I weighed less before the holiday!).
I'm getting really fed up with them as when I also calculate the power for my weight, bike weight and speed for certain climbs using Bike Calculator e.g. Box Hill, the Vectors are always low. I feel I am going to be overtraining if I am always trying to hit the correct power. I know I can hold when training on a watt bike for 20 minutes; 300 watts, I would no way be able to get near that on the Vectors I have. It feels like the whole point of training with power for me (at least on the bike) is just not working.
After the last test I did with the pedals, after re-torqueing to 40Nm yesterday, the power seemed to drop off at certain points, see Strava file below:
http://www.strava.com/activities/194516257/analysis
Could they be faulty, have you had others which consistently read low? I'm not sure what else I can do to remediate the situation? Please help as the SRM is very expensive and I was hoping to be able to use the Vectors when I hire a bike in Mallorca, which I will be doing at least once every year now.
