![]() Fine if you have a permanent pain cave, but annoying if the family wants to use the back room sometimes. Not only are the legs fixed, unlike the folding legs of many other trainers including Tacx's own Neo 2, but there's no handle to help lug it around. Tacx apparently expects you to set up the Flux S once and leave it in place. It usually takes a few seconds for the resistance of the Flux S to ramp up when you go from, say, gentle warm-up to a sprint, so it's not surprising that it takes a similar time to handle a gear change, but that lag might be a handicap if you were e-racing and needed instant response for an attack or a sprint. Noodling along at 160 watts in 34x28, I found the Flux S was able to restore resistance after a few seconds when I went up to the 25, 23 and 21-tooth sprockets, but couldn't cope if I went any higher up the cassette. Not very quickly, it turns out, and in some cases not at all. I also tried messing about with my gears to see how quickly the Flux S could respond to a change in torque to maintain the same resistance (I'm indebted to Shane Miller at for this idea). At the beginning of a warm-up and end of a warm-down, when you're only supposed to be putting out a few dozen watts, I found the Flux S simply couldn't provide resistance below about 80 watts. It's not good at delivering very low levels of resistance. Tacx claims the Flux S reads your power to an accuracy of +/- 3%, and that's consistent with my readings from the P1S in most situations. I spent 10 minutes just noodling around in Zwift to warm up both the Flux S and my PowerTap P1 pedals, did a calibration spindown on the Flux S and calibration adjustment on the pedals, and dialled up Jon's Mix on Zwift to provide a variety of efforts. ![]() ![]() It's significantly better than the Flux 1.0 and as good as the CycleOps Hammer 1.0. The Flux S has a smooth pedalling feel that's as close to feeling like you're actually riding a bike as any trainer I've used. Plug in an ANT+ dongle to your computer – Tacx makes an excellent one – fire up your chosen software and away you go. Trainers that use the ANT+ FE-C control and communication protocol are usually very easy to set up, and that's the case here. Calling this version the Flux S helps draw a line under that unfortunate episode. Tacx did about as good a job of dealing with the problems as anyone I've ever seen deal with a quality problem in the bike industry, but it unarguably hurt. The original Flux was plagued with reliability problems. It's now claimed to be accurate to 3% versus the original's 5%, but the original was better than 5% accurate anyway – as long as you got a good one.Īnd that's largely what's going on here, of course. ![]() In terms of overall function, it's true that the Flux S is largely unchanged from the original Flux. If you were cynical you might say that the Tacx Flux S is just a rebadged version of the original Tacx Flux smart trainer from a couple of years ago, but that's to underplay what Tacx has achieved here, with a high-quality wheel-off trainer for just over £500. It's still decent value, but it now has stiff competition from other budget direct-drive trainers. The successor to the original budget direct-drive trainer, Tacx's Flux S is easy to use, measures your power to a useful level of accuracy and consistency, and works with popular virtual riding applications such as Zwift to make indoor training less dull.
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