I was mid session when my wife needed some guidance on using her trainer/Trainer Road. So I stopped, paused my ride and sorted her problem. However I also showed her, on my phone, how to avoid the issue and I inadvertently turned off BlueTooth disconnecting everything. I then turned BT back on and tried to resume my ride but no matter what I did TR could not see my devices (Kickr Core, HRM and Cadence).
In the end I stopped the ride and started again.
Is there a logic/reason for not being able to reconnect after loosing BT connection?
While I typically use ant+ on my MacBook, when I’ve run TR on another device using BT, I can’t recall having an issue as you describe. A couple thoughts…
Did you check the devices screen to see if your devices were available to connect to?
Piggybacking off the first thought… when you were instructing her on the app on your phone, did you connect to (and forget to disconnect) her sensors?
The device is connected to another app or device. 99.99999% of the time this is the case, even when you’re sure it’s not.
An edge case can be that during the loss of connection it can be caught in an odd loop of attempting to reconnect to the original source, resulting in not being able to connect to anything including the original source. A simple hard reset of all devices involved can fix this.
You mentioned that “I checked on the BT settings on my phone and could see my trainer and HRM but not cadence.”
You’re devices were most likely connecting to your phone’s native BLE and that’s why you weren’t able to see them on the TR app.
As @MI-XC mentioned, if you are pairing via Bluetooth and your devices are not showing, it is usually because they are pairing somewhere else. Unlike ANT+, BLE is a 1-on-1 connection, so once it’s connected to something, it becomes invisible to everything else.
Restarting the ride probably reset things and made your devices appear. However, if this is something that starts to happen often, you can contact support@trainerroad.com, and we can take a look at the backlogs.
The devices were not connected to the phone I use with TR but were visible to the phone. They were not visible to the TR app.
They were not connected to another device. My day phone was on the other side of the house with BT switched off (to stop it stealing my headphones on the trainer) and the shared tablet was logged into my wife’s account using TR connected to her Zumo, Decathlon HRM and her Garmin cadence. These were all displayed and working on her TR account.
I use a Wahoo Kickr Core, Tcker and Wahoo cadence. I have purposefully avoided using the same devices on the same phone/tablet to try and avoid this situation.
My laptop has never been setup to use TR so never paired with my devices.
So to be clear if something similar happens again, ie the BT on my phone is momentarily switched off, I should expect TR to reconnect and resume the ride?
This assumes that there is no other phone/tablet/laptop available to “steal” the trainer/HRM/cadence connections.
No. You should expect it to be all screwed up. Don’t turn off BT in the middle of a workout. It may reconnect and be fine, but more likely it will cause issues.
That reply would have helped in the first instance. So there is no logic to not reconnecting but there should be no expectation that it will reconnect.
As I said it was a mistake but I have previously experienced BT failure causing all connections to be lost. It’s VERY infrequent but does happen.
It’s good to know that there is little point in trying to resume and restarting is the best option.
Then it probably has something to do with what 
So there is no logic to not reconnecting but there should be no expectation that it will reconnect.