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Rally XC200 power seems off

dsa1971
over 2 years ago

So I’ve had my rally xc200 pedals since nov 21 on my gravel bike. Outside on gravel I don’t do a lot of rides based on power but like to look back and some of the data to get a sense of how my RPE matched up with my power. 

inside I’ve had my road bike with Assiomas on them for a long time and use my elite direto. For the longest time I used powermatch in TrainerRoad with the Assiomas. At some point before a workout  I forget to charge the pedals and needed to use my direto exclusively. After that I did a couple of tests comparing the power for same workout between the direto and the Assiomas. The numbers were very close and Assiomas have a pretty good track record for accuracy. 

fast forward to the xc200s recently. So last weekend I did a long 5 hour gravel ride. Pretty steady pace. Felt pretty good and power numbers were pretty good for me for that amount of time.  So I decided the test the xc200s against my elite direto.   Put my pedals on, did a workout, and the xc200s were about 20 watts higher across the entire workout and for each interval compared the direto. Pedals were torqued appropriately. Calibrated. And angles reset. Only thing I didn’t do was calibrate the direto but that has rarely been an issue. 

is this normal? I expect some power difference but 20 watts is a lot.  Anybody else experience this? Of course I can solve this by always using the xc200s which is not a big deal but I think the 20 watt difference was a bit surprising to me. 

  • 0 over 1 year ago

    Hi, the manual says that the pedals need to be tightened to 34Nm (25-30 lb-ft) after having grease applied. That is some pretty tight move you have to apply unless you have one of those big wrenches. If the pedal are loose, they read low values, apparently.

    The other thing is that the pedals have to get worn before they get accurate. In the forum you read a lot of users to have readings some 50W more than was actually accurate. In my personal experience its even more than that.

    To get accurate readings, you can perform a static torque test. It involves to hang a known weight on the pedal to get a good measure of the actual force applied.

    I myself have the same problems and am on this forum to see if anybody has had luck after having checked the tightening with a torque wrench and after having performed a static torque test. My wrench should arrive in the post in a couple of days and I wanna apply the torque test data to see how am I doing. If that does not work out, I will need to contact garmin as the pedals differ by almost 100W over a period of 2 months. to be continued ....

  • 0 over 1 year ago in reply to Zephy

    I think that people are having many, variable problems with these pedals. The fact that they are not consistently accurate OR inaccurate is a big one. My pedals have half a road season on them, so I imagine they’re broken in.  Re-torquing the pedals have worked for some people, but not for me. Due to my job, I own a SnapOn TechAngle electronic torque wrench, which has just been calibrated, and the pedals still have issues. 

  • 0 over 1 year ago in reply to Zephy

    @Zephy any news ? 
    I'm going slightly mad. I'm at my third pair of XC200, all bought from bike-discount.de and the power is way off, at least 50% extra. I already tried two bikes, various calibration, one of the pairs I returned after the static test, the replacement I returned after comparing with my smart trainer, and now I'm on the second replacement which also seems off; I only rode them for ~15 minutes, but according to the instructions this should be enough for calibration.
    I'm suspecting either a bad batch at bike-discount.de, or I'm doing something very wrong, but I can't see what. Also, the first returns were accepted by bike-discount/Garmin, but I don't know if they tested the pedals or they just sent me a new pair.

  • 0 over 1 year ago in reply to Georgeavr

    Did torque them to the correct spec? If not you will get over or under readings. To loose they will be low readings, To tight they will be too high.

  • 0 over 1 year ago in reply to jasontech

    I did so to the best of my abilities. I have a torque wrench and I tighten them up to around 34Nm. It's worth noting the Garmin XC200 support video shows someone tightening them "by hand" www.youtube.com/watch

  • 0 over 1 year ago in reply to Georgeavr

    Correct the video does show them using a pedal wrench and as they are tightening the pedal to the crank arm they tell you to torque it down to 34Nm. 

  • 0 over 1 year ago

    I got the same problem, after leaving Garmin years ago because of very inaccurate heart rate indication I moved to Wahoo. This is much better and more user friendly. So I train indoors with my Kickr and on my road bike I have a Quarq power meter and these are pretty much in sync. Besides this I do a yearly test with a trainer so all in sync. So why I bought the XC100? It seemed like a good product for my gravel bike so I spend 650 euro and I did two rides with it and the power is around 100 watts above my ability. I suddenly became a super human.

    So the product is an absolute *** show and the problem is,  I will now be dragged into the customers service organisation of Garmin again. Probably with endless tips and tricks and replacements which do not get you anywhere. I am not really looking forward to this, I wished I never bought it. 

    Also all the tips below shows me that this is just not a finished product, so you need to try all different technical tricks and hope for the best.

    I hope they will be so friendly to give me my money back so I can buy a proper product.

    Shame on Garmin.

  • 0 over 1 year ago

    I got the same problem, after leaving Garmin years ago because of very inaccurate heart rate indication I moved to Wahoo. This is much better and more user friendly. So I train indoors with my Kickr and on my road bike I have a Quarq power meter and these are pretty much in sync. Besides this I do a yearly test with a trainer so all in sync. So why I bought the XC100? It seemed like a good product for my gravel bike so I spend 650 euro and I did two rides with it and the power is around 100 watts above my ability. I suddenly became a super human.

    So the product is an absolute *** show and the problem is,  I will now be dragged into the customers service organisation of Garmin again. Probably with endless tips and tricks and replacements which do not get you anywhere. I am not really looking forward to this, I wished I never bought it. 

    Also all the tips below shows me that this is just not a finished product, so you need to try all different technical tricks and hope for the best.

    I hope they will be so friendly to give me my money back so I can buy a proper product.

    Shame on Garmin.

  • 0 over 1 year ago in reply to Tonvank

    Ive had 3 sets of these pedals now and all had the same issue *initially*. It wasn't the reason I've been returning them.

    However out of the box, installed, you really do have to take several hard efforts on the pedals and then recalibrate them to be accurate.

    If I install them out of the box, calibrate and do any hard effort (1400-1600W), the pedals are mangled for the rest of the ride and will read about 100W too high.

    In my experience with 3 pairs though, after they've been "broken in" they seem accurate to my liking.

  • 0 over 1 year ago in reply to Gaudon

    This is what I mean, the product is not user friendly at all. I will try but it is a shame that this is all needed to get a 650 euro product working.

    Thank you anyway