I know there’s another Zwift topic, but I’ve read through pages of of it already and all it has done is made me more curious…

And what I want to know is quite specific: How do I get started…

Right now I have:

– A bike.
– A basic (dumb) tacx turbo (which sits getting dusty)
– Garmin Edge 500 (with HRM)
– Basic Celeron powered laptop (which probably scrapes up to the minimum requirements at best)

I always thought a power meter was absolute minimum, but I’m learning that Zwift will estimate your power from your trainer so long as you have a speed sensor. But is it any good, or am I better biting the bullet and the bullet and getting a power meter?

Smart turbo with variable resistance depending on terrain sounds awesome, but realistically I’m not sure I can justify it when I could buy another bike for that kind of money.

Interested in what setups people have and how happy they are with them.

If your turbo is supported then a speed sensor will get translated by zwift into a zpower figure.

If your PC will run zwift then you’ll need an ANT+ adaptor for it.

I’m running a dumb trainer (Elite Chrono Fluid), iPad with Zwift iOS app and Wahoo Blue Speed and Cadence Bluetooth sensor. Works flawlessly.

As above, you can run it with a fairly basic setup and definitely don’t need a power meter.

Download Zwift onto your laptop and see if it will run before you buy anything else. I have what I thought was a decent laptop and it didn’t.

Recent Zwift convert here. I’m using a supported dumb trainer (Elite Chrono Fluid), plus Garmin Speed and Cadence sensors. Also using a Mio Link optical heart rate monitor.

Connection to PC is via a Suunto ANT+ USB stick. All works rather well in my opinion. PC is pretty high end laptop (i7 with 8GB RAM and solid state drive).

List of supported trainers

Smart turbo with variable resistance depending on terrain sounds awesome, but realistically I’m not sure I can justify it when I could buy another bike for that kind of money.

You can get a Zwift compatible smart turbo for under £200 – Tacx 2240, special from Halfords or Decathlon.

http://www.halfords.com/cycling/turbo-trainers/trainers/tacx-flow-t2240-smart-turbo-trainer (10% off as well with BC)

https://www.decathlon.co.uk/flow-smart-t2240-turbo-trainer-800-watts-id_8345488.html

There have been a few reported issues of bits missing / not working out of the box / not being well made, but mine’s been fine, and has enthused me enough that I’m already saving to upgrade it if / when it goes wrong.

That said, plenty of users are enjoying the experience on dumb trainers so give that a go first.

I have a garmin watch, I bought a speed and cadence sensor as I’d wanted one for ages and it feels silly running a cycle computer, strava on the phone and my watch doing HR. I have a dumb trainer and a mac book pro, bought an ANT stick for £9.99 good to go. Only negative is Zwift thinks I have an FTP of 3.9. I don’t, its more like 2, 2.5 at best but it doesn’t really matter as all my training is against me anyway and i focus more on heart rate and cadence for my training.

I have just been through this. Our old turbo was on its’ last legs and since the missus uses it daily so I invested in a quality new one which is smart ready. However, the only spare computer in the basement was an old Pentium 4 from about 11 years ago running XP. Not wishing to spend too much on a new computer I went for minimum upgrades to get the old one to work. Basically I installed a copy of Win7 64bit I had from another machine, bunged in another MB of Ram (now 4MB) and bought a 1GB basic graphic card (£25). And lo and behold it works absolutely fine. Oh, and I used the ANT+ dongle I had already bought to use before I realised that Zwift wouldn’t work with the old computer as it was!

be warned though as i found out tonight the hard way… zwift doesn’t support old
Usb1 ant+ dongles… has to be 2.0

Hmm. Now thinking about the Tacx Flow – partly because when you factor in the ridiculous price of Garmin speed/cadence sensors, if I sold my current trainer, it would cost me maybe £50 more for the Flow.

However, I will probably buy a power meter anyway, because I would like it out on the road. And my current trainer does have variable resistance (albeit manually operated via a lever on the bars). So my conundrum is, do I really need a smart trainer. Will it add that much more to the experience?

Sensible answer might be to try power meter first, but the one I’m looking at currently has limited availability. And if I did it that way, I’d probably never get round to buying the turbo, in all honesty.

Am I right in thinking speed/cadence sensors would not be needed with a power meter, because it would be calculated from the power/weight?