Concept2 Forum

It would be nice to have a reminder for when I should perform maintenance - so just before I reach a multiple of 50 or 250 hours of use (preferably with a different notice for 50 vs. 250).

We have had our C2 rower for 4 years now. It seems to need virtually no maintenance. Unless you count wiping the rail, to clean off the sweat and dust.

In our house, though both my wife and I use the rower, I am the only one who sweats ... and I do so profusely. So I wipe the rail, clean the rollers and get rid of the sweat residue with a little window cleaner on the rail, plus a clean paper towel after each session.

As for wiping and oiling the chain, I've done that about once a year. It seems that many times, at least. There is about an inch of oil missing from the supplied bottle of oil.

Oh - and one other thing. Dust inside the flywheel housing. We live in an extremely dusty climate. After 2 or 3 years, I opened the housing and vacuumed all the accumulated dust out. Afterwards, we each had to re-adjust our preferred damper settings, because the sudden absence of all that dust made a big difference in the drag factor.

The machine works well, with that maintenance.

jessbern wrote:It would be nice to have a reminder for when I should perform maintenance - so just before I reach a multiple of 50 or 250 hours of use (preferably with a different notice for 50 vs. 250).

I log my rowing stats on a spread sheet after each session. One of the columns tracks hours rowed since the last chain oiling. When it reaches 50 I oil the chain and re-zero the formula.

john

What maintenance is recommended at 250 hours?

@john_n: I agree that a C2 rower requires little maintenance, but C2 still recommends certain maintenance every 50 and 250 hours (Model D maintenance can be found here: http://www.concept2.com/us/support/rowe ... enance.asp). I'd like to keep to that schedule.

@John Hendrie: I use the online logbook for stats and it's not quite as simple to view the total number of hours I've rowed. However, this is just the total number of hours I've rowed and I would want the total number of hours both my husband and I have rowed. I know I could just ask him and add the numbers, but it would be nice to have a simpler solution, especially for machines that are used by more people.

The reason why I'm suggesting this is that I'm pretty sure the PM keeps track of total meters rowed (for all users) and I figured it wouldn't take much work to keep track of the total time rowed and pop up a reminder.

I have long wished for a cumulative time clock to be built into the PM3. As Equipment Director for a chain of 5 fitness centers, I'm responsible for maintenance of a fleet of 16 C2 rowers.

Most commercial cardio equipment keeps an internal log of usage. The virtual distance units measured are usually machine specific (treadmills track miles, ellipticals log strides, etc.), but time of operation is a constant by which all machines can be compared evenly. The PM3 (and all previous C2 monitors) maintains a hard record of total meters rowed, but total hours can only be tracked on a logcard.

Our service schedules are based on matching our machine's time readings with the manufacturers recommended service intervals. Concept 2 is one of very few professional quality machines that does not provide for tracking this information within the electronics. I find this odd, as their own service schedules are expressed in hours, not meters.

Selfishly, I'd much rather see a lifetime chronometer displayed on the stats screen than a "maintenance required" prompt. It's important that the machine let me know when it's time for service, but I'd rather not have that message relayed to me through our members!

This could be a very easy firmware adjustment.[/quote]

bluefiddle21 wrote:I have long wished for a cumulative time clock to be built into the PM3.

Upgrade all the PM3s to V101 firmware. You can do that with the C2 Utility (or if they're really back level with http://software.concept2.com/pm3firmwar ... 1Setup.exe).

Main menu --> More Options --> Utilities --> Product ID (second page) has the lifetime metres. Assume that the average pace will be around 2:20/500m which would be near enough to 1,000,000m per week if used constantly for 11hrs per day.

In my gym lots of folks spend about 5 mins rowing at 1:50 pace 30+spm, some will do ten mins at about 2:05 28spm and a few dedicated rowers will do longer pieces at more sensible pace/rating. So you may need to do some work to record usage patterns.

I guess you'll get a lot more folks through the front door starting next week until the end of February as the new year resolution'ers start their gym memberships.

Yes, I could estimate usage from lifetime meters, but recording numbers in the billions on my handheld gives me a headache.

And yes, it is definitely Resolution Season at the gym.