If you don’t have much money to spend on a fan and/or the fan needs to fit in a very tiny space, the Honeywell HT-900 Super Turbo Table Fan is your answer. It’s small, but punches above its weight by moving more air than other budget desk fans. Range of circulation – how far the air will travel. Useful, if you are in a big room. Not so important for indoor cycling. Airflow direction is crucial you want as much as possible on your sweaty body. Elite doesn’t specify on their technical specs the exact levels or microns of stuff it’ll remove, instead saying “Activated carbon filtration is a technique used for air purification, where a gas stream is passed through a filter that contains activated carbon. This filtration process takes advantage of the porous structure of activated carbon, allowing it to effectively absorb various volatile organic compounds found in the air, thus removing air pollutants.” It’s likely an decent fan would have brought about this epiphany. But for me it was the Cardio54 wot delivered it. So it occupies a special place in my loins. Using The Vacmaster Cardio54 Heart rate: Great…until an interval. Then, during the recovery period, as my HR declines but I’m still hot AF, it slows down.

So if you do detect any bias, it is the profound emotional response to my beloved buying me a gift… which was in no way precisely the thing I specified she buy because she’d run out of ideas. The Benefits of a Fan Whence Indoor Cycling At the top of the main, you’ll see the current state of the fan connection. Red is not connected, green is happy days. Below that, you’ve got the different fan modes. Manual control allows simplistic-style control of the fan, whereas each of the different sensor options below it uses those sensor types. The Elite Aria fan connects to the following sensor types: This is the first post in a series covering recommended accessories for new Zwifters. Today, we’re talking about the first accessory any Zwifter needs: a fan! Why is a fan so important? Because without one you’ll overheat, causing your body to throttle down your power so you can’t perform at your best. I’ve got a trainer desk (the LifeLine Pro Trainer Desk), which gets in the way of the airflow if the Vacmaster is positioned directly in front of my bike. I tend to position the fan out to the side, at a sort of quarter angle. Which works excellently. Take (Remote) Control Of Your CoolingThe numbers mean absolutely nothing to me (congrats if they do to you). But my experience is that the Vacmaster is strong.

So cost is a non-event. Much like the output from my aforementioned quad-cannons. Does The Vacmaster Cardio54 Make A Lot Of Noise? Actually, that’s not quite true, I got it for Christmas from my wife. That’s right, I have given my permission for her to take paid employment. There are a lot of fans you can go for, whether you’re in the office or cooling the kids’ bedroom at night. I bought (requested the buying of) the Vacmaster some nine months into my indoor cycling journey. Until that point, I’d been using a cheap (I assume) desktop fan that makes more noise than air movement. Wahoo has a nice place to wrap the power cord around it, whereas Elite’s power cord detaches – albeit also technically wraps around the side of the filter circle as well for storageWahoo fan can also be controlled by Wahoo ELEMNT bike computers, as well as Wahoo watches, and even a handful of 3rd party apps So, please if you could suggest a fan of this power, with the remote, availible in the UK, with a UK plug and for cheaper than this, please go ahead an enlighten us. I bought (requested the buying of) the Vacmaster some nine months into my indoor cycling. Until that point, I’d been using a cheap (I assume) desktop fan that makes more noise than air movement. Versus the Wahoo Headwind, of course, it’s a bargain. The Wahoo unit, for which fan speed can be controlled actively by your speed, heart rate or an app, costs about 2.3x more. The Elite Aria fan is seemingly the smartest of smart trainer fans out there today, linking to a wide assortment of indoor cycling tech – be it power meters, smart trainers, heart rate sensors, and even body temperature sensors. All of it automatically controlling the fan speed/intensity up to nearly 50KPH winds, and all of it adjustable to your bodily whims. Oh, and it has fancy carbon filters to theoretically clean the air being blown towards your face.

After opening it up, you’ll find the fan sandwiched between some protective cardboard. From there, simply lift it up, remove the plastic, and…well…almost done. I couldn’t really think of any reason to measure it much further than that, or anywhere in between for that matter. My head isn’t usually down at the front wheel, and if it is while Zwifting, then something has gone horrifically wrong. Now, then we get to the tech side of things, in terms of connectivity. Let’s start with the sensor types they connect to: Finally, what about the filters? Honestly, I don’t have a good way to test that or the claim associated with it. So, let’s focus on what it does. First, the filters are “activated carbon filters”, which Elite primarily focuses their marketing/use cases on both “removing odors” as well as “removing pollutants”. That’s arguably the single biggest reason to have a connected fan like this. If you link the fan to your trainer, then as soon as the trainer activates some power floor, it’ll start pedaling. However, the one thing to keep in mind is that if you tie the fan speed to either power or speed values, that means while you descend it could cause the fan to decrease power/wind or even turn off. Thus, I’d strongly recommend instead aiming for connecting to heart rate, if anything at all.Remember that in addition to using the app to toggle between these modes, you can also use that settings button on the front of the fan, which will toggle through these modes and put it into a passive listening mode so the next time you jump on the trainer, it just starts automatically. You can cut that up into a million pieces and throw it in front of the fan – watching it jettison out the other end at 50KPH. It’s good fun…till you have to clean it up. But hey, that’s what 5-year-olds are for. So cost is a non-event. Much like the output from my aforementioned quad-cannons. Vacmaster Cardio54 vs Vacmaster Air Mover Speed: The worst of all. Uselessly low on a low-speed climb, and then blazing high while descending. Sure, it’s nice to have it high after the effort, but I’d rather have it during the effort too. Spoiler alert: this dispatch from the veloblogging front line might tend towards the effusive. It’s not a paid endorsement though. I bought the Vacmaster myself.

Ultimately, at this point Elite wins on virtually every feature category except the ability to use the Wahoo bike computers/watch for control – or other apps for control of the fan. But I think almost everyone is gonna either use the built-in app or sensor-driven control. Wrap-Up: The Cardio54 has a remote control, which you can either wander around with (it’s like a car key fob) or fix in the rubbery strap that mounts it to your handlebars. As you can see from the above, the main areas they connect with are covered by both companies (trainers, heart rate sensors, speed sensors). However, if you have a heart rate sensor that’s Bluetooth only, then only the Elite fan can connect to that. Likewise, Wahoo’s fan can’t connect to the CORE body temperature sensor either. Inversely, Wahoo’s fan can be controlled by their bike computers and watches, and a few smaller 3rd party apps. The remote control works well (it just works) and it certainly beats having to get down off the bike each time you need to move up the Beaufort scale. Power Usage… Or How Much Does The Cardio54 Cost To Use?The fan only blows in one direction but you can position the unit itself in one of three orientations so the air comes out either horizontally at floor level, vertically, er, upwards, or at a 45 degree angle. Horizontal setting