Correction… they claim too, the reality is they really don’t, they estimate / infer it, at a less than ideal level.
The garmin only does if you wear a HRpro strap or similar. (Unless the new generation optical sensors have improved massively in the last 12-18 months)
My watch claims to monitor HRV in the manual but when you do it comes up with a message, wear HR chest strap.
My experience as well, so I went back to Garmin, had two warranty replacements and an upgrade to the HRPro, seems a tricky thing to get reliable for all manufacturers / brands.
I used to go through HR monitors every 8 months (Tickrs, Polar H9s). Now I have it figured out. It’s not the sweat getting into the case. I ruled that out by application of silicone grease so that there was no chance of sweat getting in there via the battery cover. Yet the problems persisted.
The cause was sweat accumulation on the back of the unit that ultimately forms a connection between the two snap/poles. My solution is to make gaskets out of latex tube material that prevent the sweat from making a connection between the two snap/poles.
Cheap and effective:
Plus, you got to drink two beers to get them!
Bonus if you play guitar, they make great strap locks.
@Pbase, are you thinking of a bottle cap gasket? If so, what beer? The gaskets I made are from a blown latex tube. Beer may be more interesting.
Think what you will, but they didn’t last for me, despite trying different straps. Wahoo’s support and warranty were great, but the frequent failures were annoying.
As some context though, I have killed every external pod HR strap I’ve owned in less than 3 years. They just end up corroded, so I guess I’m a salty boi. The old garmin rigid strap was sweet, and I didn’t kill it, I just lost it somewhere. I wish I could get another one of those. My current polar seems to be lasting well, but at only a year old, i cant say for sure yet.
I have a belief that as soon as I convince myself that my current strap is lasting longer than usual, it is about to die.
Oops, guess I’ll be in the market for a new one soon then…
I didn’t express an opinion, I simply wondered how much of the “negative press” is due to a high failure rate and how much to the increased desire to comment when one has had a negative experience. Both are real factors, and none of us know the actual failure rate of this product or how it REALLY compares to the competition’s failure rates.
Maybe the failure rate is atrocious. I don’t know. Maybe it’s similar to its competitors on a percentage basis, and we’re seeing a bunch of negative reports from people who’ve genuinely had a bad experience… but we’re not seeing reports from many people who’ve had positive experiences because it’s a known fact that people post less about positive experiences. Again, I don’t know. More likely it’s a combination of the two. But again, I don’t know. Nor does anyone else.
Think what you will indeed. Then buy whatever seems to you to be a better choice. Just know that a bunch of anecdotes, positive or negative, are data… but not statistically-valid data.
It was bad-bad. Wahoo, at all levels of the company, from CEO down to employees, has admitted it was bad-bad. They aren’t pretending it wasn’t bad-bad.
They’re saying they know what caused it (a blend of bad straps + not owning the chipset stack, so they couldn’t actually see the raw data coming off the sensor to know it was even bad). Whether or not that holds up…only time will tell.
A couple of years ago, there was a Wahoo support acknowledged design flaw in the then newer straps. If you go through the TICKR thread, you’ll see discussion around this. For some, it took multiple straps to get back to a usable state.
Many of us bailed and generally went to Polar or Garmin.
Ah, so there is solid data about the high failure rate. That answers my question perfectly, thank you.
Glad to have been lucky with my great TICKR experiences then!
Not that I don’t believe you but was there an article on this?
My understanding is youd want HRV when you sleep, not while working out? Are people actually planning on sleeping in this thing?
+1 here… 3 Wahoo HRs to date.
My first garmin strap worked for more than a decade. I had a 4iiii that worked for a similar length of time. I’m not an excess sweater. Then I went through a number of TICKRs that were maddeningly flaky. Sometimes worked sometimes didn’t. Reset Reset Reset. I tried different straps - something most HR monitors don’t seem to care about. I’m more stubborn than most which is a professional requirement for me. It was all wasted time due to a crappy product. The worst experience I’ve had with a cycling product. I envy those who got a working model and never had a problem. I got to a point where I didn’t understand how they could have them on the market. Maybe I’m just cursed.
For contrast, I’m still running an original ELEMNT. That thing just keeps trunkin along.
I recently learned in another thread that some of Garmin’s Firstbeat analytics use HRV in real-time. They specifically mention it for Training Effect and FTP Detection, and apparently there’s a Real Time Coaching feature? I had no idea it existed until Google just told me, but it seems like it will allow you to set a goal, then will tell you to work harder or back off, or something like that. There’s apparently a real time TE datafield, too. I’ll investigate when I have literally nothing better to do. Which isn’t to say it won’t happen.
the real-time HRV stuff works well for me. I’ve had a Garmin Dual HRV HRM for about 5 years now.
100% this. I tried using an older tickr for HRV and the numbers were useless, but it took me a while to figure out that the data was garbage.
