I am a facility director for a YMCA association with 4 branches, it is my job to maintain the buildings and equipment, including all purchasing of equipment so I can chime in here. Last year I authorized just under $80,000 worth of cardio equipment purchases from Precor and Life Fitness to name a few.
The commercial Precor you reference is a solid machine. We have 5 of them in our branches. We recently purchased 2 from a YMCA that closed its doors for $2,500 each and they were less than 6 weeks old! It was a steal. You would be happy with them, two we have on the floor are pushing 5 years old and just require routine maintenance and we’ve had nothing major go wrong with them.
The majority of our treadmills are Life Fitness though. The branch where the Precors are has all LF 95TE’s with built in touch screens with TV’s. The Precors look just like the one in your link with no TV, so they do get used last and least. However, when a touch screen goes on a LF (or a Precor for that matter as we have several Elipticals from Precor with monitors) it is a $1,000 minimum to fix. So if you are looking for used be wary of ones with touch screens/monitors. If it is a monitor that mounts on top of the console and it goes bad no big deal as you can still use the unit just no TV, but if it is the integrated display (like most of our LF equipment) then you will have to replace the monitor for the unit to work.
We also have several Matrix brand commercial treadmills. They seem ok, but they just feel different than the LF ones and we have been having to replace the handles where you increase/decrease the speed or incline at an alarming rate.
Personally, I’m a big fan of the LF ones and do a lot of my runs on them. In fact, the next purchase we make will be to rotate out some of our older treadmills (we try to not keep them past 5 years, however we have 4 LF 95 series that are pushing 8 years and still going strong) and when we buy new we usually get a small amount for trade in for any working models. Its usually on a few hundred to thousand dollars max. I will be figuring out a way to get one the LF 95Te’s without a monitor/integrated display for my own use by paying the trade in value we would be getting for it directly.
So to summarize:
The Precor commercial one you are looking at is solid and worth the extra $1,000 and would last you a long time.If you are looking for used, try to find a LF 95 series without the integrated display.Given the choice, I run on our LF, then Matrix, then Precor treadmills in that order (but only because the Precors don’t have TV’s and I get bored).We had older Star Trac units years ago, thought they were junk.
Also, one last thing, if you are getting a commercial series treadmill make sure you have a dedicated 20amp circuit to power the unit. Trying to run it on a 15 amp one in your house will not work and will cause the breaker to overheat/trip. You needed dedicated line with a 20 amp breaker.