Stages dual-sided power reading imbalance

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mikehhhhhhh
Posts: 252
Joined: Tue May 16, 2023 3:08 pm
Location: UK

by mikehhhhhhh

I have had a few power meters - A set of Assioma Duo-shis, two Quarqs, Flux 2 trainer, Neo 2T trainer, 4iii left side meter and they’ve all agreed within 1-2%.

I recently got a new bike with Shimano and opted for Stages dual sided R8100 cranks based on a good review from GPLama.

I’ve found they are a good 8-10% over all the other power meters I have, with the left reading significantly higher than the right. Which is funny, because even in the review video GPLama mentions having to “mess around” a bit to get them reading properly, without alluding to what was done.

I’ve refitted to spec twice, updated firmware, zero’d countless times, changed batteries three times and even reached out to Stages support with no response since November.

Now, I'm aware that absolute figures are possibly not that important, but all of my meters aligning, as they have so far is important to me as I train on different bikes. The fact they are so poorly balanced really bothers me too.

Has anyone else had this problem and found a solution?

Cranzai
Posts: 6
Joined: Tue Mar 21, 2023 8:21 pm

by Cranzai

Do you still have the Assioma's in your garage?
Insightful check would be to mount them on your new bike, and verify what the actual measurements should be.
Your L/R Balance might change a little bit based on bike setup

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mikehhhhhhh
Posts: 252
Joined: Tue May 16, 2023 3:08 pm
Location: UK

by mikehhhhhhh

Annoyingly, that's the one meter I no longer have.

I'm testing back to back on the turbo with the bike that has the Quarq (which has always been my reference) and the new one.

AJS914
Posts: 5433
Joined: Tue Jan 28, 2014 6:52 pm

by AJS914

I'm amazed that you got all these power meters to agree over the years. I have a Stages gen2 that I use for all measurements. My kickr v2 reads 20 watts low across the board. My Tacx Vortex was just wildly inaccurate. I compared them all to a powertap and that was 10 watts below my Stages.

I had all sorts or reliability issues with my Stages until I figured out that fresh, brand name, retail packs of batteries worked way better than 20 packs of cheap no-name batteries off Amazon. The retail batteries last me twice as long as the ones that come in 20 packs so the net cost is a wash.

TobinHatesYou
Posts: 12585
Joined: Mon Jul 24, 2017 12:02 pm

by TobinHatesYou

AJS914 wrote:
Tue Jan 09, 2024 10:00 pm
I'm amazed that you got all these power meters to agree over the years. I have a Stages gen2 that I use for all measurements. My kickr v2 reads 20 watts low across the board. My Tacx Vortex was just wildly inaccurate. I compared them all to a powertap and that was 10 watts below my Stages.

I had all sorts or reliability issues with my Stages until I figured out that fresh, brand name, retail packs of batteries worked way better than 20 packs of cheap no-name batteries off Amazon. The retail batteries last me twice as long as the ones that come in 20 packs so the net cost is a wash.

Power meters should generally read with a couple watts of each other other the hub-based ones. That is the expectation. Anything beyond 2% divergence is problematic.

https://analyze.dcrainmaker.com/#/publi ... 8c4da73dba

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