Wattbike Woes

Have now owned an Atom for three weeks. I mainly use Trainerroad with some occasional Zwifting. This is an honest appraisal of the trainer.

The issues raised in the comments of the road.cc review are all issues I recognise. The Atom struggles with large jumps in resistance so that when it goes up say 120w it will over compensate and the resistance climbs higher which slows your Cadence which then creates more resistance. It sorts itself out eventually but it’s a pain (sometimes literally). Conversely big drops in resistance cause your Cadence to ramp up again leading to an oscillation where you end up trying to maintain the power and more often spinning out the gear.

Zwifting is not a pleasant experience generally with ridiculous ramps in resistance when the gradient rises and no idea what gear you are in unless you run the Wattbike hub app concurrently.

The hoods offer little feedback when pressing the buttons and if you take them off the shifters look pretty cheap and not very robust.

Want to do an FTP test? You have to do one in ERG mode on Trainerroad (and Zwift) and then increase or decrease resistance using the app, you can’t ‘freestyle’ the testing phase. This alone is an insane state of affairs! FTP tests are best efforts by nature so if you are using ERG then that must surely affect the test.

Finally the overall build quality is good but the bars (which are an odd circumference and are therefore at this stage not swappable) can drop when rocked so intervals requiring standing can cause the bars to drop unless you tighten them insanely tight. Also, it makes no sense to have to use Allen keys to move the saddle and bars forward and backward, as this seems to fly in the face of using the Atom for multiple users. It’s not hard to use the Allen keys although I do wonder how long it will be before the one on the saddle rail shears off.

Overall, for £1500 this is a massive disappointment. Support from Wattbike is slow and cursory at best. When I discussed the above with them I received an email basically telling me that this is all normal and the Wattbike is operating as designed. So basically it’s been designed to do only steady state intervals provided there’s a long ramp into and out of the interval.

Selling the idea at home of this device was challenging but the other half went for it on the basis of the simplicity of use as opposed to the Tacx Ironman we had before. We are both contemplating sending the Atom back and going back to the Tacx.

I don’t want Wattbike to fail with the Atom but it’s so far off the mark with how normal people use it that I can’t in all honesty recommend it to anyone unless you really only want a workhorse trainer and even then there are so many other better options than the Atom.

2o2m