Originally Posted by waterrockets

Personally, I think it takes close to 1500W to do this

Yeah, like DrWJ said, all I'm trying to measure is the effect of rotating mass on bicycle acceleration. What I found is that it takes around 2W to accelerate my tube and tire from ~450rpm to ~550rpm. Then I said that this rotating mass is similar to the difference between a pair of Zipp 404s vs Velocity Deep-Vs.

The 1-second interval in the PT combined with the speed reading lag are far from ideal for this test, but the system does respond at this level. If I spin up really fast from a standstill, I get about 50W, so it's not like it's always going to get single-digits or anything.

I have not done an error analysis on this, but I feel I've made a decent argument that rotating weight in bicycle wheels has a very very small impact on performance. Compared to aerodynamics with deep section rims, rotating weight is irrelevant.