Wahoo, I’m Flatlined!
When a product sucks, I‘ll tell you; and the new revision of the Wahoo TICKR sucks.
For the past two years, I’ve used a first-generation TICKR heart rate monitor chest strap. And it worked flawlessly until the snaps corroded and fell apart at the end of June.
And before that, I used two Garmin HRM straps and then one branded by Bontrager (although I have no idea who actually manufactured it for them). So I’ve had HRMs for around 15 years and know how to care for them and what kind of data to expect.
Shortly before my old TICKR died, Wahoo Fitness had conveniently announced a second-gen version of the TICKR, which I promptly ordered.
That was back in June, and the subsequent two months have been a litany of disappointments. Despite my updating the firmware and other troubleshooting tasks, the data coming out of the new unit was unusably bad, when it produced any data at all.
In feeble hopes that they’d sent me a defective unit, Wahoo shipped me a second unit, which was just as worthless as the first… Then offered me a third.
After giving Wahoo two months and testing multiple devices, I gave up on them and bought an HRM from their competitor Garmin, which was nice, reliable, and accurate straight out of the box.
To give you an idea how bad the new TICKR was, look at the following chart. It shows measured heart rate over the same 5-mile route for those three brand-new HRM straps, alongside estimated power to give you a level of effort to compare against.
What should you see here? What the Garmin HRM shows: a smooth, undulating curve that responds to and follows the contours of the user's power output, ranging all the way up to the user’s max heart rate.
Instead, both TICKRs spend long periods completely flatlined, when the unit isn’t registering or updating the user’s heart rate, often not responding at all through entire high-intensity efforts. Obviously incorrect, the TICKRs would report a sudden increase in pulse in the middle of a resting period, or a sudden drop in heart rate smack in the middle of a high-intensity interval. And the TICKRs never measured more than 75-85% max heart rate, despite intervals where I put out one-and-a-half times the power of the Garmin run! Hence the unbelievably low average heart rates. Based on my observations, the TICKR has a promising future… not as a heart rate monitor, but as a random number generator!
I saw the same consistent behavior irrespective of which unit I used, and whether I used it outdoors connected to my bike computer or indoors connected through my laptop to Zwift. The only time I was able to get a momentarily reliable reading was if I was sitting up in the saddle, riding no-handed.
Releasing poorly-debugged products has become Wahoo’s claim to fame, due to well-publicized problems they’ve had with their indoor trainers and related accessories, and now something as simple as an HRM strap. The one exception is their well-received line of bike computers, which is in perfect opposition to Garmin, whose recent bike computers (looking at you, Edge 820!) have been terrible.
So while I got great value from my first-gen TICKR, I strongly recommend against the second-gen TICKR. If you want an HRM that works, my endorsement goes to the slightly more expensive (but functional!) Garmin HRM-Dual.