Power Spikes

[nigeld]

I've been getting seemingly arbitrary 2000w spikes here and there. Today I got two more but now I'm thinking it's not random. I attempted to do a Cal Ride and CDs today and on the way home was on the coast screen checking out the coasting numbers, the spikes occurred on the downhills. I've heard of whacky wattages on descents, but has anyone else come across almost exactly 2000w spikes while coasting on the coasting screen? These lasted for 30+ seconds each.

Also the file name for one of today's files is ....92_Miles...csv - that ain't right! That's happened before too, don't know if that's a iBike or iBike 3 problem.

[Ratman]

Yes, I've noticed power spikes of similar magnitude after having changed to the Coastdown screen in an attempt to check my calibration. I can't recall it ever affecting the file name or obviously increasing the ride's mileage, but it's reported under "max watts" and appears to be reflected in the ride's average watts, too. I never tried preventively using "Trip Reset" to splice out ride segments during which the Coastdown screen is used. I don't know why the spikes occur??

[wellmt]

Yes it's definitely the coast screen that causes the spikes. I've had it too.

[Velocomp]

When in the coast down mode your iBike screen shows you both positive and negative power numbers. This is done so you can see as precisely as possible the quality of your calibration.

The iBike 3 software isn't designed to recognize negative watts numbers (why should it, negative total watts are impossible under "normal" circumstances ) and so this may account for the odd watts spikes. Just ignore 'em.

[nigeld]

Thanks for the explanation John, makes sense. I'm glad I found the source of that phenomenon, now I know to do trip resets between coast checks so I can exclude those ride sections from my log. It would be nice if there was an edit feature whereby you could edit those rows to remove such spikes via the iBike software.

[Velocomp]

It's easy to edit iBike files in Excel; just delete the rows that contain annoying data.

[nigeld]

Yeah, I've tried that before in Open Office (don't have Excel on this laptop) and I could not re-open the file in iBike. Open Office must be doing something to the file. I'll give it another go with a plain text editor.