Have you tried it without the heart rate strap? And, 75 hours is a lot. Mine needed changing monthly sometimes. And, you don't need auto pause. It's suuuuuper annoying. Disable it.

While you shouldn't need to change the batteries after 75 hours, I would try it anyway. I've had bizarre dropouts like you describe in the past get resolved by a battery change.

I haven't tried it without heart rate, and would like to keep both ideally. 75 hours is a lot? I thought I'm supposed to get upwards of 200 hours. Don't you usually get a low battery indicator on the 500? This is the first I've used a PT. I never had issues with auto pause, helps keep averages with stop lights

In terms of training: The rest that you get at a stop light IS a rest/break/interval gap. If you stop/start recording around those, you're artificially inflating your averages, beyond what you could hit if you went out for an un-interrupted ride (say, a race).

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Less is more.

Thanks and considered. Trying not to turn this into that debate like every thread I could find on this subject

They may be thinking you are referring to the battery in the 500. That thing lasts 20ish hours outdoors. Are your numbers of 75/200 hours referring to the PT battery? If so, there is the cause of confusion.

It sounds like the Garmin is autopausing due to an interruption in one of the signals - either power from the PT or speed while outdoors. If you like auto-pause, cool...but temporarily disabling it to see if that cures the problem will be good info. I bet you will see a power dropout that does not recover. If so, the PT is to blame, either the battery or the rest of the hub.

Yeah I'm referring to the PT battery in those numbers. I hope it's just the battery just found it strange that I could get 2 hours on the trainer done with Zwift (not connected to Garmin) with no problems in the middle of dropouts on outdoor rides connected to Garmin.

Here is the battery life of some PowerTap wheels:

Day 1-17, Very Good
Day 18-29, Very Good
Day 30-35, Very Good
Day 36 COMPLETELY DEAD

So you never know. I don't think I ever got 75 hours from mine. When I was riding almost every day, I'd change the battery monthly. Also, the battery is the very first thing I would have done, even before posting to ST. Your Garmin 500 reads an ANT+ radio signal. It needs good power to transmit a good signal.

That sounds about right. Why the hell do they advertise 200 hour battery life of I can't even get half that?

That's probably 200 hours of broadcasting zeroes if you're sitting around at a cafe. As soon as you actually start pedalling and the thing has to do some calculations, battery use goes up and battery life goes down.

This isn't based on Cycleops or Power tap, just every other consumer electrical product ever.

You may have a more serious issue, but I was puzzled for a while with similar issues that I found related to radio interferences with my powertap ANT+ feed;

> Last winter, I kept loosing power on the trainer (lost connection to the PTAP with my Garmin). After a while, I noticed it was only happening when I was watching Netflix on my PC over WIFI while riding, never when riding the trainer programs only. FInally understood that I had some interference going on between my WIFI and my PTAP. Sounds weird but sure enough, after I started paying attention to it, sure enough, the behavior matched the issue. I since then hardwired my setup with an Ethernet cable through a powerline adapter to stop using the WIFI to stream videos and no problems since.

> I also see the auto-pauses happening the road, but not frequently and always for just a short time. With the knowledge above, I started noticing that I would get always the auto-pause happening in the same spot on my usual training route. Sure enough, some radio antennas near that location.

I also have the very occasional auto-pause triggered randomly at times including in races (annoying) but now based on the above I just assume some type of interference.

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T. Guertin / Spocket