Your Garmin help, please

If someone lends me one for a weekend I can test it.

Anything that survives me will survive anyone.

That was the kind of thing I wanted to know. My google skills seem to be failing me at the moment & most of the reviews online aren't as oriented towards whether it crashes on long routes, powers down when it loses external power, makes it near impossible to load courses from a phone, etc, etc.
All special Garmin features I've grown a bit tired of...

Which Garmin do you have?

No matter which device I'm using I would tend to chop my routes into 200-400k chunks.

I'm kind of in the same boat. I'd like to try one out but I'm not going to commit to buying one yet. I have too much £££ in Garmin shit.

I previously had an 800, now have an 810. I'm actually pretty good at dealing with Garmin's quirks - I've got workarounds for all those issues (such as splitting up routes like you say). I have just come to the conclusion that it'd be nice to deal with a product where you don't have to find workarounds all the time. From what I've gathered online, Wahoo are a lot more interested in listening to their users than Garmin are.

When I got the 810 I thought it'd be nice to be able to quickly upload an audax GPX route from my phone to the Garmin via bluetooth. Which seemed like it should be pretty straightforward. After a bit of searching on the Garmin forums, this appears to be the ridiculously convoluted process. https://forums.garmin.com/showthread.php?368038-How-to-import-gpx-or-tcx-files-as-courses-in-Garmin-Connect&p=938451#post938451
Which just means I won't bother. Which isn't hugely important as it's not at all essential, but is why i'm thinking I might prefer to switch to a different company altogether.

It seems you can use all the standard Garmin ANT sensors with the Wahoo as well, so I wouldn't need to buy those again. But I presume you've got power meter type stuff to deal with, which I suspect is more complex.

My 800 is way better than the 810 I sent back. But the 1000 is better than both.

But yes, Wahoo have an actual living, breathing, listening software development group which is what appeals to me. I just don't want the hassle of learning another device's quirks just now.

Bluetooth? umadbro?! I never enable that shit. No BT, no wifi, no automatically syncing shit with shit. Because apart from battery drain, if there's one thing I know, it's that the more features that more chance Garmin devs have fucked it up or will fuck it up.

Powermeters ANT+ mostly so shouldn't be an issue with Wahoo. I've just not spent any time investigating and at £250 I'm not prepared to 'test' one.

Yes, I picked up an 810 cheap, but it turns out it's not really an upgrade at all. I was about to ebay it and start keeping an eye out for a cheap 2nd hand 1000 on ebay, but I think I'd like to go with a different company on principle.

Battery drain is less of an issue for me (because I'm slow anyway so don't really care about running it off a hub dynamo all the time). But the idea of being able to control a device via phone does appeal because I'm not always near a computer when I want to upload routes or whatever.

The only negative stuff I found about Elemnts online seemed to be people complaining about power meter issues. But that was earlier on so suspect they've been resolved. Plus think it might have been non-standard power meters too.

Just do what @amey said, and you can test it:

Buy direct from them, they have a rapha style no questions asked 30 day returns you just have to send the box back to Belgium.

Loving mine so far. The turn by turn on routes from RWGPS seem solid. I've only been out on one 70km route with it but it worked flawlessly for me first time. I was at least expecting a few hiccups while I learn the device - nothing yet.

I for one would be really interested to hear how it copes with you mental audax types :)

I guess that might work, I didn't know about that. Might wait until I've got some longer rides planned though. God, do I really want another system?

Once the route is loaded onto it, does it need to talk to the phone still? I don't want to run Wahoo and phone at the same time.

Do they have maps on-board?

I haven't used it without my phone present yet but yeah - once a route is synced you no longer need it.

Maps for pretty much the entire world come preloaded on the device, with something like 100MB free space. I deleted all the maps except for Europe and now there's over 1GB of free space on there.

They're OSM maps, yeah? As OSM gets more detailed is the unit going to struggle with storage space? I have a lot of store routes on my Garmin for example and can just bash in an SD card. Does Wahoo have an SD slot?

No SD card slot. OSM yes I believe so.

You have over 1GB of space. If map space becomes an issue in future it's trivial to delete/download regions as needed.

No quick postcode search with it I presume? I know it's a faff to get it happening with OSM.

Can it do any kind of on-the-fly routing to a pub/servo/hospital or is that when you need to pull out the phone?

Haven't tried it but yeah ad hoc routing requires phone.

Yes, I was on my fourth different 810 in 18 months. As soon as Wahoo added TBT to the ELEMNT I made the jump. It has its weaknesses but it has proved reliable. For me that's a prerequisite and that's something the Garmin was atrocious at. The software development on the ELEMNT is also moving forwards instead Garmin's approach of fixing one issue by introducing two different ones.

10,000km of riding later and the ELEMNT has inspired confidence. Happy to recommend them and keen to support them in creating a strong competition. Hopefully this will force Garmin to raise their game.

I for one would be really interested to hear how it copes with you mental audax types :)

It's very good for the really long stuff. It copes with very long route files and ride recordings (longest so far is 660km). It's also fine about being plugged and unplugged during recordings. My old 810s would brick themselves if I tried anything so bold.

I've also found the battery to be pretty decent too. 10-12 hours using the map screen, but it recharges very quickly (I'm guessing it's relatively small capacity but fairly energy efficient).

Another benefit for audax riding is the ability to navigate using the LEDs. That means you don't need to have the screen illuminated during night riding.

That's exactly the kind of endorsement I was hoping for.
(you just answered all my other questions with that second post).

No charging issues. Never lost any data. The only time it's crashed was when I tried to sync a huge amount of route files (multiple variations of my TCR route) which included one corrupt file. Once I'd removed that (3,800km file) it's been bulletproof.

The weaknesses I think it has are relatively minor.

1. The elevation measurements seem to be low frequency, so it under-reads quite a lot on rolling terrain and the time lag makes the 'grade' display a bit useless.
   
2. The audible alert (TBT) could be louder.
   
3. One useful feature I miss from the Garmin was having it display the map screen when I was coming up to a turning. Hopefully that'll be added as an option in a future software update.
   
4. The breadcrumb trail of your route guidance is only displayed for a few km ahead, so if you make a larger diversion it's harder to navigate back to your planned route on the fly.
   

navigate using the LEDs...during Knight riding

navigate using the LEDs

Eh wot? Sounds mad.

The LED strips on the top and sides of the ELEMNT can be used for TBT cues. They do left/right/straight, which is usually enough on longer rides. If you come across any more complex junctions I just hit the button and pull up the map screen.

@hippy and Elemnt are like Rachel and Ross .. will they? wont they? ..

I have £££s invested in Garmin and upcoming races that count on my kit working plus a tonne of other shit to test out so it would be a big change I'm not likely to make just yet.

These two issues would annoy piss out of me, for example:

One useful feature I miss from the Garmin was having it display the map screen when I was coming up to a turning. Hopefully that'll be added as an option in a future software update.

The breadcrumb trail of your route guidance is only displayed for a few km ahead, so if you make a larger diversion it's harder to navigate back to your planned route on the fly.

That does sound good...

I think I'm definitely sold on it based on this thread. But then my requirements are a little more relaxed than @hippy 's. I suppose the thing about audaxes is you don't tend to need to reroute very often, so I just want a reliable course to follow that won't stop working up a Welsh mountain at 3am. I also never want to use paper routes sheets again.