How "bad" should I expect the wrist heart rate to be?

Most of the problems I have with oHRM come when it's cold. And the weird thing is that it's seems to be more important to keep my hands warm than my arms.

In terms of overall averages the wrist monitor works moderately well. However for higher intensity exercises it can really be flakey. Part of the reason for this is the LEDs consume battery energy and I have seen some indications that the watch still uses polling of the heart rate during a run. Because if I'm not wearing my chest monitor I will typically see my heart rate shoot up nearly instantly to my average heart rate for that pace rather than building slowly. I've also found you have to have the wrist band quite snug or the wrist monitor will go into a "cadence lock" where it reads the heart rate as the movement of the watch on your wrist PLUS the actual heart rate with a result of very high readings.

Now a note on chest monitors. Most of which is something you are quite aware of being a long term user. First, if the chest strap become salt saturated beyond a certain point the readings in my experience seem to go way high. However posts on the Net indicate they can also go low or drop out totally. BTW, my experience is the low readings are a result of a battery that needs to be replaced. Because what I've found to correct a chest monitor reading low is a new battery. For me what keeps the chest straps reading accurately is a soak in a bowl of water overnight after every workout and a cycle in the wash with a load of clothes once a week. If I let that weekly washing slide then I'll find the chest monitor will go into a cycle of reading way high that can sometimes be corrected by "snapping" the monitor on my chest. Garmin won't like seeing this but I've also found the Polar chest strap to be much more sweat resistant than Garmin's soft strap and the Garmin monitor will snap into a Polar Soft Strap. Hope you kept your Polar straps.

Final tip is B&H Photo & Video in NYC. They have superb customer service and the widest selection of accessories and best prices I've found.

As a long term Polar user, I don't know why you'd consider going back to a chest strap a downgrade. The chest strap will always give the best heart rate readings.

I also was a long term Polar user and had no issues sticking with a strap due to the lower accuracy of the optical heart rate. I used a strap for so long, sticking with one didn't bother me.

Chest strap does it :)

Hello again,

Sorry for not answering this in time, I have no excuses...
The solution for me was, indeed, another chest strap. I hoped the wrist measurements would show at least a real median value, which was not the case.
I was disappointed because I quite often forget to put the chest strap on, and either have to run without it or, especially annoying in the winter, have to dig between layers to put it back on.

I have actually bought a cheap one, the Geonaute bluetooth/ANT+. I am quite satisfied with it.
Thanks for the tip with the Polar straps, I'll keep that in mind.

I will keep the wrist HR for monitoring my RHR, which is quite neat but never really cared for when using Polar's strap.
All in all, I find FR235 to be much more appropriate for me than Polar's V800.
Setting interval workouts is a number of times easier, and I also can see the average pace for those intervals, which is what I wished for (and were not available for V800). Ran the Bucharest Marathon a week ago with this setup and the distance measurement looked also better than V800 measurements last year (42.5 km vs 42.8 km) on almost the same pace - I have also seen that usually FR235 tends to do a better approximation of a trace, although the v800 GPS specs are generally better.

Best Regards,
Costa