What has been your experience when your stages PM batter gets to the end?
Usually mine tends to report a higher than actual power, although this time it seems to be reporting a lower than actual power. On today’s ride(and the last week’s worth) HR has been significantly higher than normal for a given power(No illness, RHR has been fine, and HR during the day has been consistent).
I really don’t want to throw away good batteries, but I’m almost ready to just replace it every month regardless to avoid errant power readings.
Mine just stops being picked up by my bike computer or iPad. I haven’t looked back to see if the power readings seem abnormal right before the battery gives out though.
That is generally the next thing that happens. Always seems to crap out when I’m planning to ride outside, maybe my Garmin has a harder time connecting than my laptop when the PM’s battery is low?
My tell tale sign that the battery is getting low is the power getting fixed on a certain value for many minutes or showing zero. Often it can report falsely high values like a few weeks ago when it recorded about 1725W! I wish! If this happens during a ride I’ll open up the Stages app when I get back and if the PM doesn’t show up or can’t connect I change the battery and normal service is resumed.
If you are thinking of replacing the batteries more often I have found that there are actually rechargable CR2032. I got mine and a charger with a completely different gadget, but sure you could buy them somewhere. Saves creating a mountain of empty batteries.
Mostly it can’t be found for connection. Tired of Stages and it may be due to its age so ordered a new 4iiii PM. Just waiting (impatiently) to come in and no more PM issues … hopefully.
Do you check battery status on the app or on the garmin? It’s not massively useful, seems to be full, 75%, 25%, dead, but maybe an indication when to change batteries?
I checked it with the garmin, it reported battery status as ‘OK’
Checked it with the Stages App and it showed a full green battery
checked it with the TR app on my phone, and it reported as 23%
Just seemed like more reviewers around the net were recommending 4iiii than Stages. Also, I just wasn’t willing to take another chance with Stages after all the issues the last few years.
My Garmin gives me a low battery warning and checking with a volt meter the battery is close to dead. If I do one or two workouts after that warning the battery will die during the workout. No issues with bad power readings. Same behavior with gen2 left-only and gen3 left-right.
I own and have owned gen 1, 2 and 3 Stages and a single 4iiii unit. Battery sealing on Stages poor until Gen 3 resulting in poor battery life. With my 4iiii never had a problem.
Also, 4iiii has really handy scaling feature so you can align its readings with another power meter, eg in my case Saris H3. I run 4iiii at 0.97 so both read within 2% of each other.
4iiii is often cheaper too but even if priced same I’d go with 4iiii every time now.
The only sign of the low battery is the dropped signal.