I’ve been drooling over power meters forever, but never been able to justify the expense. £1,500 minimum for a decent spider/crank based meter, £800 for a hub based. Both of those are new bike territory for me.
I recently heard about PowerTap, the hub based manufacturers, releasing an Ant+ based heartrate monitor that gave a power reading that was both reasonably accurate (+/- 5%) and cost the same as a HRM, in the £60 range.
As my existing HRM was the cheap Garmin stock one (not the premium Garmin HRM) and starting to show cracks along the centre pads I decided to replace it with the PowerTap and try it out. It cost no more than the Premium Garmin HRM and gives both heart and power.
I’m also interested to see if I can figure out how they do it. It seems from the reviews to be purely based on heart rate, and some clever software based interpolation of change in rate of heart BPM.
Anyway I await it’s arrival and some more statistical goodness shortly.