Drag Factor Survey

[[old] Bayko]

Perhaps it could have been the temperature, but my sense was that the humidity made the difference. The temperature range wasn't very much, from about 68 degrees F to 80 F. Even with the temperature now as low as 49 F the drag on the same damper setting has only been about 121-123. It was only on the very humid, high dewpoint days that it went down to 114. It didn't seem to make sense to me either, but that's what happened. Consistently.<br /><br />P.S. Having moved the damper to get the figures at 3, 6, and max, I've now reset it to 115, which is on the about at the middle of damper 4. And it was weird on max drag. Hard to believe now that my wife and I started out using damper 10 and were like so many others in insisting that maybe we were different because the low damper felt terrible by comparison. It felt like I was going to injure my back last night just doing 5 or 6 strokes to get the drag factor.

[[old] Galt]

Well I sure learned something that was counterintuitive to me.<br /><br />I talked to C2 today, and they told me that as the erg gets dirty, the drag factor will decrease. This is because as the outlet holes become blocked with dust, there is less air flow in the chamber, and the drag is casued by airflow.<br /><br />I had not cleaned our erg in 3,000,000 meters since we bought it last February.<br /><br />I took it apart and vaccuumed it out and voila!<br /><br />My drag factors went from...<br /><br /> 75 to 85<br />104 to 119 <br />140 to 165<br /><br />They told me that there can be variance across machines even due to how much paint is applied to the screen.