I have a confession: while I regularly ride, clean and maintain my road bike, I have never bothered to clean my trainer bike (road bike that lives in the garage on the Kickr), I just change the bartape once a year. I knew it was gross and I just didn’t want to deal with it - just kept adding lube/drip on wax whenever it made noise. I’ve put in probably 1200 hours indoors over the last 3 years, and this morning the rear derailleur seized. I went ahead and ordered a whole new groupset and bottom bracket and will get it swapped out next week. I’m so irritated.
Trying to find the brightside, was my old drivetrain costing me watts on the trainer? I imagine only marginally, if at all, but any little bit helps! Here is a pic of the rear derailleur:
I once stopped oiling my chain for a month just to see what kind of losses that would cause and by the end there was a ~20 W difference between my power meter pedals and what the trainer reported. I can’t imagine how many watts that was costing you, but on the bright side, you’re probably incredibly strong now.
I’ve always put out more power outdoors than indoors, and that’s seemingly not uncommon and widely discussed/accepted on the forum. I am curious to find out if new drivetrain components help to close that gap.
The pulley wheel in the photo. It was similar to being jammed from a dropped chain, but the chain was not dropped. When I took the chain off I could not get the chain to pass through the pulley wheels.
I did eventually take the bike off the trainer, remove the rear derailleur and pulleys, cleaned them with a wire brush, scraped the gunk i could off with a nail, put them through the ultrasonic cleaner and reassemble. Everything seems ok-ish now, and hopefully holds until the new parts arrive.
You do you, but agree there are other approaches than changing out the whole drivetrain! How much you lost will depend on where you were measuring power - if cranks or pedal, there will be no difference. If the trainer, certainly quite a bit.
Yes, could have just replaced the pulley, but given the sad state of affairs of the drivetrain components in general it will be nice to just start fresh.
