Saris H3 Direct Drive Smart Trainer

The Saris H3 takes over from the H2 as the company's top-end direct drive trainer. It's better than the H2, which was already excellent, and Saris has dropped the RRP by £150 making it even more competitive. So there's a lot to like here, and it's a serious contender for your cash.

• Pros: Accurate, quiet, good build quality
• Cons: Cadence sensing isn't the best, doesn't ship with a cassette

Setup: Easy as you like (but bring your own cassette)

Like its two predecessors, and most new indoor trainers, the H3 is a doddle to set up. Once you've lugged it out of the box it's just a case of flicking out the legs, adding your cassette (it's not supplied with one, which is a black mark), fixing your bike to it with the right end caps (all the normal standards for road and mountain bikes are covered) and plugging it in.

The lead it comes with is nice and long, and there's a low-profile front wheel plate included which fits snugly into the base when the legs are retracted.

If you have an uneven surface in your training den there are threaded feet to take up the slack.

Connecting it to various training platforms on various hardware platforms was simple enough via both ANT+ and Bluetooth. It supports ANT+ FE-C and Bluetooth FTMS, so it's controllable from apps over either protocol.

At 21kg it's a heavy old thing so it's not too easy to lug about, but it feels very solid once you've attached your bike and hopped aboard.

Accuracy: On the money

One of the main things you want a smart trainer to be is accurate: there's not much point chucking £800+ at a trainer if the numbers are all off. But that's not something you'll have to worry about here. The H3 is capable of producing 2,000W of resistance and simulating a gradient of up to 20%, and my testing shows it to be pretty much spot on. I can't really comment on whether it's accurate up at 2,000W though.

The graph below is 10 minutes of a session on Zwift, after an hour to give the H3 plenty of time to warm up, and a spin-down calibration. The blue line is the H3 trainer and the purple line is the Rotor 2InPower cranks on my bike. I've benchmarked the cranks against plenty of other power meters and I'm happy that they give accurate and repeatable numbers. As you can see, the two lines track each other extremely well and there's no point where there's any real discrepancy. This is backed up by the average power for the section of the workout, which is exactly the same.

Diving in a bit closer, here's a set of three short sprints. There's a bit of discrepancy between the height of the peak and the exact timing, but the H3 is higher and in front twice, and lower and behind once, so it's probably more to do with sampling rate than anything else.

Here's a ramp up from below 100W up to a 700W effort, and then back down. While there are some minor discrepancies along the way there's nothing to suggest that either power meter is making a bad job of tracking the effort, and again the average power is very similar.

Again, looking at the mean power curve there are some slight discrepancies at the very top end but for the most part the two lines mirror each other almost exactly.

You might expect the H3 to read below the cranks, because there are losses involved with moving your power from the cranks to the rear hub, but that's not the case here. I'd say that the Rotor cranks read at the high end of accurate, having benchmarked them against a bunch of other power meters and trainers over the last year or so, so that would put the H3 up there too. We're not talking much: a couple of per cent, so within the stated tolerance of the trainer.

If you have multiple power meters on the go then sometimes there's some translation to be done as one feels a bit harder than another for a stated power than another, and they don't need to be very different to notice the difference. My FTP is around 300W, but 2% above that is a very different experience than 2% below it, 10 minutes into an exercise block.

If the H3 was your only power-measuring device then I've no doubt that it's giving realistic and accurate data. Most importantly, it's repeatable: the mechanical interface between the bike and the trainer doesn't rely on anything other than the chain on the trainer's cassette, so there's nothing to adjust that would affect the readings – 300W on day one is going to be the same as 300W on day 99, meaning that you can accurately track improvements (or otherwise) in your fitness. You can spin-down the trainer to calibrate it in various apps, and as often as you like, but I didn't notice the H3 power readings drifting at all and only calibrated it once.

Cadence: Not always great, but mostly good when you need it to be

Cadence sensing is done algorithmically, with the trainer working out where you are in a pedal stroke based on what's going on with your power. It does a decent job most of the time: when you're applying constant pressure on the pedals the H3 is pretty good at knowing how quickly they're turning round.

The system has its limitations, though. Mostly that's when you're coming off the back of a big effort and the trainer's not taking the strain as you ease off.

In the constant effort section at the start there are a couple of drops but generally the H3 does well. After the first big sprint at about 1:14:20 the cadence drops right back: my legs are still spinning but the trainer can't sense that as I've wound it up to over 1,000W and it's spinning faster than I'm pedalling. Most of the other dropouts are the same: easier pedalling after a harder effort.

Realistically you'll mostly be monitoring your cadence when you're working hard, and the H3 is capable of giving you accurate numbers for those parts of a ride/race/workout.

Ride feel: Very responsive and smooth

The H3 responds really well to changes in your training. In ERG mode it's very quick to adjust the training load when switching from easy to hard, or vice versa. There are some structured training sessions that I'd normally do in manual as they contain short sprints (10 seconds and under) which ERG trainers struggle to replicate; the H3 did better than most.

In Zwift, the changes in gradient are swiftly applied, and the result is a very realistic feel. Even through Titan's Grove, where there are lots of short, sharp changes in gradient, the H3 didn't struggle to keep up.

> Get started with Zwift

The 9kg flywheel and sturdy frame make for a solid and reassuring feel when you're in the saddle. There's no side-to-side movement, so if you like to fling yourself about on the bike it might feel a bit more static than you'd like.

Noise: Much quieter than my fan

When I first set the H3 up I thought it sounded a bit noisy, until I realised that my chain was dry and kicking in with most of the noise. Once that was attended to things quietened down a lot. I measured the noise level of the bike and the trainer together at the bars, putting out 200W, at 57db. That compared favourably to my fan, measured at the same point, at 63db. That doesn't sound like a big difference but the decibel scale is logarithmic, so 60db is a sound ten times as powerful as 50db. Anyway: the fan is a lot noisier than the trainer and the bike combined, and the bike is weighing in with a fair bit of that noise, even with a well-oiled chain.

The H3 is well balanced too; it doesn't vibrate much in use at all, even when you're really going for it. That makes it a lot quieter on wooden floors and means it's more suitable for an upstairs room or an upstairs flat.

Overall: A great quality trainer at a lower price

There's no doubt that the indoor trainer market is getting increasingly competitive, and whereas a couple of years back you were looking at a £1k spend for a direct drive smart trainer, there are a good number available well below that mark now.

> Buyer's Guide: 17 of the best indoor trainers and rollers

The H2 was one of the thousand-pound old guard, and the H3 is a better trainer – quieter and a bit more responsive – for a chunk less money. For those reasons it's easy to recommend. The H3's performance is up there with the best direct drive units; it's not quite as capable as the Tacx Neo 2, with its ability to replicate road surfaces, but it's now £350 cheaper and the gap between them is smaller than that price hike might suggest.

It's not perfect – the cadence sensing is still a bit wonky at times – but it's an excellent trainer and ideal for a serious home training environment.

Note: The original value score and conclusions were made based on the rrp at the time, and the Saris H3 Direct Drive is now priced at £599.

Verdict

Excellent smart trainer that's quieter and cheaper than its predecessor