burnthesheep wrote:
I'm late to the party but if borrowing equipment to "stink test" isn't an option for folks, find a really steep little section of road in town. Even if very short. Just long enough for maybe 30sec of power data.
Weigh yourself with bike and all kit. Then climb it trying to hold some constant speed or power. Preferably when not windy and slow enough that it's more CRR/climb than aero drag. Then plug into the aeroweenie calculator. Grab the CRR from bicyclerollingresistance.com.
It's not a 100% thing but it can probably sniff out a 20w or so problem.
My left only stages is pretty much just a kilojoules tracker for outdoor riding. If I "care" about a ride due to doing intervals in upper zones, I will toss the file through the fit file fixer and boost the power by like 3% or so knowing the left stages is so far off my other meters and trainer I trust more. Otherwise, kilojoule/calorie counter.
You can do this more or less by just looking at your Strava segments that you use repeatedly - there should be tons to choose from. Just by looking at the ones you do frequently, especially for z3 efforts which are sustained harder efforts for a fixed duration, you should be able to see if the power is fluctating by 20 watts pretty easily.
Honestly, it seems like everyone bemoaning SS is using Stages or older-gen PMs.
I've posted earlier about this, but I've been using 2 separate Favero SS for 2 years now, and there is not a single segment on Strava ,be it a 30 second sprint, or a 45 minute climb/TT segment, that makes me question the power - every single segment I've done across 2 PMs are so accurate that you can gauge my fitness down to what seems like the watt on each workout in the leadups to my race. On bad days, the wattage is down, and on strong efforts its up - in pretty much every case, I the power is so reliable that it differs by less than 5 watts from what I expect, at in worst case scenario, less than 7-8. Literally never 10 or more, and I'd say 95% only 5 watts. Heck, I did 3 Oly races in a 3 month period on flat, hilly, and mixed courses, and I rode to RPE without targeting any specific wattage, and my Faveros pegged my overall race power at 250, 250, 251. I wasn't surprised at all - that's the typical kind of watt output consistency I see with my SS Faveros.
I think with the modern tech today, we should limit the SS vs DS argument to Faveros or similar-gen SS PMs. The stages singles are old, out of date, and have been almost always the single offender for those claiming 20 watt type error. 20 watts is so far out of the universe of error in my Faveros it's absolutely ludicrous.