Wheel on trainer - Calibration

OK so I have a Tacx Genius which I use with my track bike most days - I appreciate that youre supposed to calibrate twice, ie after 10 minutes once the tyre is warmed up etc… but like most people Im time crunched usually do early morning sessions and dont have time to do the 2nd calibration.
I firstly calibrate the trainer via the tacx app and then sit on the bike and run the TR calibration and then if I dont have time forthe second I increase the load between 5&10%.

So the question - has anyone done any research into this and worked out approx how much the power reading of the trainer would be out if not calibrated when warmed up??

Maybe switch your approach.

Any chance you can just start riding in the trainer and ignore the “First Calibration”, and simply do the “Second Calibration” that comes after the warm up?

Rationale being that there is little problem with doing a warm up via the default values (even if they are not “correct”) since you are just doing a stepped warm up protocol. Just do one calibration after you get over that hump.

Effectively, you just change when you do the one calibration and don’t need to do two calibrations in any case.

Cheers Chad… Ill give that a go, I ididnt know what an uncalibrated trainer would be putting out power wise so have always done the first one, prob out of habit tbh…

Not sure where I got the figure from but the second I do around the ten minute mark, is there any reason for ten minutes or would five suffice??

I learned from the TR support that there is no difference between the TR and the tacx calibration - TR just send a ‘doCalibration’ command to the trainer. The calibration is stored inside the trainer.

I found that the tacx app gives more useful feedback though, the red-green bar of whether your wheel tension is right. I can somehow deduct that feom the number TR reports back, but only now that I know how it works (0 is best, small positive numbers are towards ‘too tight’, and numbers close to 65535 are ‘too loose’).

To be honest, I only calibrate my trainer every few days now, and it seems fine. It’s more important to have the tyre pumped up correctly imo.

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I think the 10 minutes depends on the temperature - if the trainer sits in a cold room, longer might be better, if its at a fairly onstant temperature 5 mins might be enough.

I don’t remember a hard number. I think the ones I have seen are a general 5 minute minimum up to 10 or 15 minutes, depending on manufacturer.

Overall, I don’t think there is magic in the number as long as you get through a proper warm up. In the case of TR workouts, I would just do the full warm up (seems to range 5-10 minutes) and run your calibration in the time between the warm up and the full workout sets.

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Depends if you have a powermeter as with my snap I just did power match with my 4iiii and rarely did the calibration/spindown.