Recording your really really long efforts Wahoo Bolt, Garmin , batery life etc.

waltaz · Jun 17, 2019

economatic said:
24 hour race success with the Edge 530. I put it in the battery saver mode and after running for a total of about 22 hours it had 63% battery left. That was with a HR monitor and Stages power meter connected.

The (potential) bad: In battery saver mode it goes to "sleep" and shuts off the screen. If you push buttons it comes on for a few seconds then quickly goes back to sleep. That wouldn't be good if you had to use the navigation or want to constantly know your stats but it was great for my 24 hour race. I find it demoralizing later in the race when lap times and speed crash to pathetic levels...but with the screen off I was able to stay focus on just pedaling and choosing good lines on the trail.

Thanks, Brad...great feedback! I'm about to pick one up. My Wahoo bricked 3x on the last lap (was fully charged), but it recovered the already-logged ride. I'm done with it.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

economatic · Jun 17, 2019

waltaz said:
Thanks, Brad...great feedback! I'm about to pick one up. My Wahoo bricked 3x on the last lap (was fully charged), but it recovered the already-logged ride. I'm done with it.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Not so fast. If you can, you might want to wait a few weeks or months to buy an Edge 530. Read the reviews about the buttons. What many people describe about the buttons sticking is true. It seems when dirt and dust gets around the buttons and they do in fact stick. Its not unmanageable at the moment but pretty annoying and I've only done 5 or 6 rides with the unit. Not sure if it'll get worse as time goes on or in different conditions but I bet they'll revise the button design.

I actually knew about this going into the purchase so I decided to buy from REI where they are great about doing returns for defective equipment. I'm going to pester Garmin about the problem. If they won't do anything I'm pretty sure it'll go back for a refund or trade it in for a different model. From my limited use, it seems like a much different button design from other models and inherently flawed.

kosmo · Jun 19, 2019

I think those buttons might be a challenge. My ancient Edge 500 just started doing this. Very annoying, but I've more than gotten my money's worth. Still going to ping Garmin about it.

economatic · Jun 19, 2019

The buttons are a lot different from the Edge 500. They're larger and all plastic with no rubber covering. What happens is if you don't press them directly in the middle they get wedged in their housing and it gets worse when it's exposed to dust. It isn't a big problem until you're trying to quickly press a button while riding and wearing a pair of gloves because you can't easily feel for the center of the button. It's almost a comical flaw with how they were so focused on MTB features with this unit.

Kosmo...totally unrelated but will you be at Butte 100 this year?

MattMay · Jun 19, 2019

Was about to buy a 530 from REI but read all the bad reviews about the buttons issue. Checking the Garmin site, availability is 2 weeks out, so I’m hoping that’s due to them fixing the issue, as I doubt they’ve sold out.

kosmo · Jun 19, 2019

economatic said:
The buttons are a lot different from the Edge 500. They're larger and all plastic with no rubber covering. What happens is if you don't press them directly in the middle they get wedged in their housing and it gets worse when it's exposed to dust. It isn't a big problem until you're trying to quickly press a button while riding and wearing a pair of gloves because you can't easily feel for the center of the button. It's almost a comical flaw with how they were so focused on MTB features with this unit.

Kosmo...totally unrelated but will you be at Butte 100 this year?

Thanks for the button info. Maybe Garmin will give me a reasonable deal on a swap for another 500, though at this point, they owe me nothing.

Probably a no on the Butte 100 this year due to family travel schedule. Almost certainly yes for next year.

How about you?

DaleinTexas · Jun 19, 2019

Nice feedback!!

JoePAz · Jun 19, 2019

I did the entire 24 hr race on my e-Trex 30. Kind of bulky unit, but lasted the entire 24 hrs using 2 lithium-Ion double A batteries. When it was cold in the early AM battery level dropped to 25%, but once it warmed up I was back to 75%. I have run the AZT300 which covered 4 days on 1 full set of batteries and 25% of another. Works great for what it is which is really best to follow courses. The only issue when I tried to down load my race file it was broken up in to 4 different files. This was a result of the autosave. Last 12 hrs in one file and first 12hrs in 3 files. I used topofusion to merge the tracks and then up loaded the combined track to strava with no issues.

waltaz · Jun 19, 2019

economatic said:
Not so fast. If you can, you might want to wait a few weeks or months to buy an Edge 530. Read the reviews about the buttons. What many people describe about the buttons sticking is true. It seems when dirt and dust gets around the buttons and they do in fact stick. Its not unmanageable at the moment but pretty annoying and I've only done 5 or 6 rides with the unit. Not sure if it'll get worse as time goes on or in different conditions but I bet they'll revise the button design.

I actually knew about this going into the purchase so I decided to buy from REI where they are great about doing returns for defective equipment. I'm going to pester Garmin about the problem. If they won't do anything I'm pretty sure it'll go back for a refund or trade it in for a different model. From my limited use, it seems like a much different button design from other models and inherently flawed.

I actually just ordered an 830 today off Amazon; a vendor had a couple in stock. I'm kind of geeked for the touchscreen.

economatic · Jun 21, 2019

kosmo said:
Thanks for the button info. Maybe Garmin will give me a reasonable deal on a swap for another 500, though at this point, they owe me nothing.

Probably a no on the Butte 100 this year due to family travel schedule. Almost certainly yes for next year.

How about you?

Bummer! I'm almost certain Butte 100 is happening for me this year. I didn't really plan on it but my race schedule got all messed up due to an illness in May and then my job is preventing some other races I had on my radar. It's been a couple years so we were hoping to catch up with you at Butte. Hopefully next year but send me a PM if your plans change.

waltaz said:
I actually just ordered an 830 today off Amazon; a vendor had a couple in stock. I'm kind of geeked for the touchscreen.

Let me know how you like the 830. I almost went that route but I was concerned about what people had said about the 820(?) and sweat affecting the touch screen. I bought my 530 from REI since they have such a good return/exchange policy so if Garmin won't do anything about the buttons I might upgrade to the 830. Luckily I have 2 months to figure it out.

Burning Matches · Jul 11, 2019

economatic said:
Let me know how you like the 830. I almost went that route but I was concerned about what people had said about the 820(?) and sweat affecting the touch screen. I bought my 530 from REI since they have such a good return/exchange policy so if Garmin won't do anything about the buttons I might upgrade to the 830. Luckily I have 2 months to figure it out.

I've had the 830 for a few weeks and so far no issues with the touchscreen. I'm new to Garmin though, coming from Polar, and the 830 is not without bugs and flaws. I've had some sporadic connection issues (with both phone and sensors), some map zoom issues, and I find a few things are poorly designed (like the stupidly mandatory Virtual Partner, Auto Pause not restarting until I've reached 3.5 mph, Auto pause not working at all when following a workout, etc.). I've become quite active on the Garmin support forum trying to sort it all out. But the touchscreen has been working solidly.

waltaz · Jul 11, 2019

Burning Matches said:
I've had the 830 for a few weeks and so far no issues with the touchscreen. I'm new to Garmin though, coming from Polar, and the 830 is not without bugs and flaws. I've had some sporadic connection issues (with both phone and sensors), some map zoom issues, and I find a few things are poorly designed (like the stupidly mandatory Virtual Partner, Auto Pause not restarting until I've reached 3.5 mph, Auto pause not working at all when following a workout, etc.). I've become quite active on the Garmin support forum trying to sort it all out. But the touchscreen has been working solidly.

I agree with the touchscreen; no issues at all thus far, and really handy, IMO. I have also had some connection issues, where it doesn't upload immediately to the app on my phone, and thus, Strava, but turning it off and on resolves it each time. Hoping that goes away. All in all, I really like it, and the screen is way crisper and brighter than the Wahoo. Not looking back one bit.

vikb · Jul 27, 2019

DaleinTexas said:
This will be my first time trying to capture and entire 24 hour MTB race..

Should be interesting to see what fails first, batteries, or data capacity.

Anyone else attempt this yet? Advice?

I don't race, but a Garmin Etrex 20 with lithium batteries will last more than 24hrs.

economatic · Oct 30, 2019

OK, so I have a few months of use on the Edge 530 so I can give some additional feedback in case anyone is curious.

Buttons: They're not nearly as bad as when I first got the unit. I think getting some dirt in them wore down the plastic so they don't stick as often. I regularly deal with situations where I press the button and nothing happens--I think it's 50/50 the button sticking vs. the processor thinking hard and the button presses are delayed.

Battery Save Mode: This turned out to be somewhat glitchy under certain circumstances. I learned during Oregon 24 that if you have a course loaded it will often kick it out of battery save mode. Even worse, it turns on the display light whether it's light or dark and will kill the battery fast. It also happened a few times when I encounter any saved Strava segments.

Trailforks: It's nice to have the maps but the feature to let the GPS recommend a route based on how many miles you want to do is worthless. I tried this feature once in ABQ and it took me through private property with no trespassing signs. Obviously the maps are not current so I didn't bother trying it again after that experience.

Software Updates: It seemed to have a mind of it's own when to update the software. I've seen it initiate the process in the middle of a ride. Surprisingly, it didn't affect tracking but I don't think I'd been happy about it doing that in the middle of something where I was relying on the the maps.

User Interface: This is well-documented but many of the menus are not very intuitive. I constantly find myself fumbling through the menus looking for things that are in weird places. I usually spend time to learn all the features but I found myself getting impatient with this GPS and said, "f$%k it" and just rode my bike. I'm sure there's a long list of metrics and data points I could play with but I haven't bothered. Admittedly, that's on me.

I focused on the negatives here but overall it's a nice little unit. I decided to keep it instead of returning it for something else. I think it's great for throwing on your bike for a casual ride but it's almost as if they tried to do too much without perfecting the core features. It's sort of like the Edge 800 I got a few years ago...lots of features but when you try to use them they'd often fail. That said, I'd never rely on it for navigating in unfamiliar areas. I have my backup eTrex 30 for that and my phone with offline maps that serves as a backup for the backup.

waltaz · Oct 30, 2019

economatic said:
OK, so I have a few months of use on the Edge 530 so I can give some additional feedback in case anyone is curious.

Buttons: They're not nearly as bad as when I first got the unit. I think getting some dirt in them wore down the plastic so they don't stick as often. I regularly deal with situations where I press the button and nothing happens--I think it's 50/50 the button sticking vs. the processor thinking hard and the button presses are delayed.

Battery Save Mode: This turned out to be somewhat glitchy under certain circumstances. I learned during Oregon 24 that if you have a course loaded it will often kick it out of battery save mode. Even worse, it turns on the display light whether it's light or dark and will kill the battery fast. It also happened a few times when I encounter any saved Strava segments.

Trailforks: It's nice to have the maps but the feature to let the GPS recommend a route based on how many miles you want to do is worthless. I tried this feature once in ABQ and it took me through private property with no trespassing signs. Obviously the maps are not current so I didn't bother trying it again after that experience.

Software Updates: It seemed to have a mind of it's own when to update the software. I've seen it initiate the process in the middle of a ride. Surprisingly, it didn't affect tracking but I don't think I'd been happy about it doing that in the middle of something where I was relying on the the maps.

User Interface: This is well-documented but many of the menus are not very intuitive. I constantly find myself fumbling through the menus looking for things that are in weird places. I usually spend time to learn all the features but I found myself getting impatient with this GPS and said, "f$%k it" and just rode my bike. I'm sure there's a long list of metrics and data points I could play with but I haven't bothered. Admittedly, that's on me.

I focused on the negatives here but overall it's a nice little unit. I decided to keep it instead of returning it for something else. I think it's great for throwing on your bike for a casual ride but it's almost as if they tried to do too much without perfecting the core features. It's sort of like the Edge 800 I got a few years ago...lots of features but when you try to use them they'd often fail. That said, I'd never rely on it for navigating in unfamiliar areas. I have my backup eTrex 30 for that and my phone with offline maps that serves as a backup for the backup.

Thanks for the detailed review, Brad! I also have few months with my 830, and I really like it, and much prefer it to the Wahoo ELEMNT. Only issues I've run into are dripping sweat causing screen touches/changes and intermittent failure to connect to my Bluetooth HR and cadence sensors, which drives me up a wall. But overall, a great unit! Love the crisp, bright display. I don't navigate with it, though, and use my iPhone on a Quadlock mount for that.

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

brentos · Nov 12, 2019

I'm in the Garmin 520 with aux battery in a tank bag camp. I just plug it in at the start and let it go, no fiddling around mid race that way. I use a standard handlebar mount for the computer as I found that an "out front" mount creates shadows in the periphery of my headlight beam.

Used this setup for the Marji Gesick out and back. 29 hours, if I hadn't needed to boost the charge on one of my lights with the aux battery, I would have been fine. As it was it came up just short, that was with backlight on (10%) and navigation running the entire time.

Recording your really really long efforts Wahoo Bolt, Garmin , batery life etc.

waltaz

economatic

kosmo

economatic

MattMay

kosmo

DaleinTexas

JoePAz

waltaz

economatic

Burning Matches

waltaz

vikb

economatic

waltaz

brentos

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