The Saga

I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with my powermeter. I love having one and all the juicy data that it gives me. Wonderful. However, I am not a massive fan of the specific powermeter that I have.

My powermeter is the original version of the Garmin Vectors. Great device (sort of), pretty accurate, consistent, does all the things that a powermeter should do. Easyish to swap between bikes too, which is exactly why I got them way back when. All hunky dory then.

Well no not really. My main issue with the original Vectors is that they are compromised by so many design flaws. Easy to break, pretty tricky to install right, even if you do everything right they will wear out eventually, needless to say my issues with the design are many. I think the fact that they are poorly designed is well illustrated by Garmin significantly changing the design over the years to the point now that Generation 3 (the current one) is finally around where they should always have been. Another illustration of their issues is that when a friend of mine gave up on his Vectors and moved on with his powermeter journey I eagerly obtained his bag of spare parts. Not only was I happy to receive these spare parts but I beat out several over keen individuals to do so, such was the need for replacement parts. People beating each other up to obtain a cache of small spare parts does not usually indicate a highly reliable product. Not a good sign.

Of course now that I have stopped racing I can't really justify a powermeter upgrade, so instead I slog away with my Garmin Vectors Gen 1. Normally they don't cause to many problems, but then every now and then one of their vulnerabilities rears its ugly head and they break. Tonight for example.

I have to admit that the breakage of my Vectors this time was not entirely the fault of the product, this particular breakage came about because I accidentally gave one of the pedals a big knock a couple of weeks ago. At the time I thought the fact that the powermeter suddenly stopped working was due to a flat battery, however, as I found out tonight that was not the case. Instead the sudden cessation of function was due to a damaged contact pin on the right pedal. The fact that the proper functioning of the device relies on fragile contact pins in the first place is part of my issue with the design, but moving on.

Normally this sort of breakage would have been a major pain, eating up my entire evening as I rushed around trying to find replacement parts, trying in vain to update their firmware, failing at all that and then finally giving up, tired, frustrated and powermeterless.

Not tonight though. For once, resolving my Vector issue was actually pretty straight forward. Once I realised the fault I went straight to the aforementioned bag of spare parts and quite quickly found a suitable replacement bit. The replacement was a bit old which meant I needed to update the firmware, but once again that was actually straight forward for once. I downloaded the updater, found my ANT stick from where I hide it to be used once a year for my annual Vector firmware update (usually prompted by a breakage). The updater connected as it should and also updated the firmware as it should (but never actually seems to). For once the issue was resolved easily, frustration free and all in about 30 minutes. Amazing. Always nice when technology comes to the party, so often it seems to stay away.

Still not the biggest fan of the product, and I know it will only be a matter of time until I have another breakage, but I guess for now I can live my dodgy Vector Gen 1s. At least until my bag of spare parts runs out.