Reliability of your Garmin Edge

[Gruffy]

I'm having a terrible time with my 810. Garmin are about to replace it for me and haven't put up much resistance - credit to their customer service. A replacement is all well and good but I've had such a variety of problems with mine that I wonder if it's fundamentally flawed or if I'm simply unlucky. With the length of my rides going up and the Transcontinental next year I really need something I can have confidence in.

So, how's your experience with your own Garmin Edge device? Please add a note with the model you have and any relevant thoughts on it.

[Gruffy]

whatleytom said:

Whats the problem with yours Gruffy?

It's a long and expanding list but the major problems are:

• Turns itself off frequently (50% of rides)
• Crashes on startup (5+ times in a row, typically)
• Backlight turns off when a turn notice comes up at night so you can't see what turn should be made
• Loses activities
• Paired with a phone it beeps constantly with a 'download complete' message, every 5-10 seconds. I once left this running for an hour and it never stopped.
• LiveTrack seems to cause even more frequent crashes (not uncommon, from what I understand)

Losing my rides is the final straw. It's lost a few over the year I've had it. Today I rode the first 50km with the thing seeming OK (it did take half a dozen attempts to boot though) and then it turned itself off. I turned it back on (another half dozen times as it kept crashing) and it eventually picked up a GPS signal about 10 minutes later, but the map screen was blank and I had no navigation. When I got back home I went to upload and it's only got 5km of the ride. Then it crashed again and now it won't even boot or connect to my computer.

I love a company that has decent customer service and I'm hoping I just have a duff one.

[Gruffy]

TADTS

[Gruffy]

Their customer service seems to be quite strong. It's their product that isn't. I do think their monopoly has made them lazy when it comes to support and development but there does seem to be some competition on the horizon.

http://uk.wahoofitness.com/devices/elemnt.html

Still quite basic next to what the phone in your pocket is already capable of, but looks like a step ahead of the Garmin cycling products and is where I'd probably look if I was buying again.

[Gruffy]

That's not been the case for me. Every ride I have ever done has begun with a press of the start button. There's been no recognisable pattern to the incidents where it turned itself off. It's been anything from a few minutes to a few hours into a ride when it's happened. 'Auto-off' has also been switched off for a long time, in case that was contributing to it.

[Gruffy]

Garmin have sent me a replacement 810. Pretty quick about it too. Sadly that's where the good news ends.

First ride with it today on a 70km ride on familiar roads. It crashed after 34km and lost that data. Then it crashed four more times before I could carry on. Turn-by-turn navigation wasn't working. It'd tell me when I was off course but wouldn't tell me what the course actually was. Crashed twice at the end of the ride but, thankfully, hadn't lost the last half of the ride.

This is supposed to be a reconditioned unit that's gone through all the necessary tests and been approved as in 'as new' condition. I'll give it a couple more rides but with the number of flaws this one is already showing I can't see that lasting long.

[Gruffy]

I don't bother pairing the phone. More trouble than it's worth. Nothing else going on beyond the Garmin HRM and cadence sensor. It has the OSM maps installed but I grabbed a fresh file from OSM for this unit just to eliminate that as a possibility.