After roughly three years of hard use, my original Wahoo TICKR gave up the ghost at the end of the summer. Given how well it had worked for me, I picked up a new, updated version without hesitation. This was August. The photo above shows the new strap on the left, and the older (replacement) strap from my original TICKR on the right which I purchased to troubleshoot my original TICKR. Notice anything weird there?
Yeah, it’s super corroded. And to make matters worse, it’s been cleaned several times over the last three months, and it always ends up looking just like that, or worse, after a few uses. Unsurprisingly, when it’s corroded, it doesn’t work very well as a heart rate (HR) sensor. When if first started happening, I thought all it needed was a firmware update, but that was only a temporary fix; probably because I also thoroughly cleaned the strap at the same time. The only thing that has really “fixed” it has been not using the strap that came with the new TICKR. The older (right) version is still corroding way faster than the original strap (which I still have), but at a slower rate (no idea why), so with some extra care and cleaning, it’s been doing OK.
Unfortunately, neither is a great long-term solution. And since, I suspect that Wahoo did something to the materials mix in the contacts on their newer straps because it’s happening on both straps, even if I get Wahoo to replace the strap that probably won’t actually resolve the issue.