Stages Cycling power meters available in UK

Yeh, fair comment, they are a pretty pricey toy just yet, but that won't stop a lot of sportive-types buying them - just look at the money spent on bikes already. And thats no criticism, for those who can afford it why not buy the best, it helps bring down the price, and the more units sold the better for us all.

I don't think you need to be too deep about power meters, some people will use them wisely for race training, others won't, and many will just use them to monitor and compare their rides - just as for hr monitors. At the very least they add a little more interest and a little more incentive to your rides, especially for the kind of rider that already records gps track, elevation, speed, cadence, and heart rate. But if you train on rollers they can be extremely useful, and as one coach has often said to me, for indoor training especially - the more the data the less the boredom

Nick T wrote:

Heart rate can vary day to day depending on physical condition, ambient temperature, altitude etc and varies from person to person. Power is constant and absolute so you can tell if you're having a bad day or if it just feels like you are, and you can compare your results to other riders.

Wether any of that is important to you is for you to weigh up.

Well, to be fair, power numbers themselces are very individual too - you can broadly compare power-to-weight (which is easy to calculate) for climbs and power to drag (difficult to calculate) for flat riding, but neither really tells you the whole story. The main point, as Nick says, is that power is an absolute, not a physiological measurement - so you can compare how hard you are working (heart rate) with how much you are producing. That might or might not be useful!

And the Pros are Pros, so they can justify the need/want to have a power meter. For average riders like us a HRM will do! in fact I don't think I even need that! but if you can afford all these Gizmos then why not. Powere meters are also not 100% accurate either

arfa wrote:

for the unitiated here, what is the advantage of power meters over heart rate monitors ? if your heart rate is up at or close to max what difference does power data make ? I know the pro's all use them but for your average joe, power monitors seem to be pretty expensive for limited additional information benefit

But beware buying direct from the USA - I got charged £110 import duty and VAT on a Stages sent to me free of charge to test!

In the very unlikely event of a failure (the device is solid state, no moving parts) I think you'll get a very rapid replacement by Stages themselves. Its one of the things that has delayed the UK release - they wanted many months of trouble free use in the USA and a trusted distribution and support facility. Its something they've very much thought about.

I've had a DA version to test for a few months now - it works a treat with Cyclemeter, Wahoo Fitness and Strava. It gives cadence and power meter data which is reliable and very close to the other sensors I compared. The Strava website is particularly good with power data, but the app isn't great. Cyclemeter and Wahoo Fitness are better apps, and the data can still be sent or uploaded to the website.

The Stages is not available for any carbon cranks - the strain gauge just doesn't work with them.