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Power meter only showing 50% of the expected value!

pbarham
over 5 years ago

I recently upgraded my Garmin to an Edge 520 Plus.  I managed to connect my power meter (Watteam PowerBeat G3) just fine, but all of the power readings appear to be almost exactly 50% of what I expect.  When I upload my rides to Strava, the recorded power data is much lower than the Strava estimated power.  I don't think I had this problem with my previous Garmin 520.  I just bought an indoor trainer (Wahoo Kickr) and now I have proof that it consistently shows a power value twice as large as the Garmin.   

The factor of two suggests that this is something to do with the power meter being 'left only' vs total power.  I don't know why this would be different between the 520 and 520 Plus.  Perhaps related to using Bluetooth for the Plus and ANT+ on the older 520?  Is this just "expected" and I never previously noticed? Or have I misconfigured something?

Either way, this is really frustrating since I can no longer make sense of my Strava data.  The FTP values from the bike trainer are *way* larger than from my real bike. Is there any way to configure this so the two power sources are consistent? 

PS  The firmware of all of my devices and power meters are completely up to date.

  • 0 over 5 years ago

    Switch to using ANT with Plus and see if that fixes the issue.

    Some vendors BLE implementations are poor and requires you to connect to both sides rather than just one side that aggregates the data like the ANT implementation does.

  • 0 over 5 years ago in reply to aweatherall

    Thanks!... I switched the power meter back to ANT+ and I *think* it does look more sensible.  (will need to do a more rigorous test before I declare victory)

    Unfortunately, that means I can't use the cadence data from the power meter when I'm using Zwift on the trainer (can only use Bluetooth on my iPad)  I guess I can either buy an ANT+ receiver for the Ipad or a cheap Bluetooth cadence sensor for the bike.