Zwift Coffee break
 

For some reason, I can't seem to activate the coffee break option when riding Zwift. I can see the icon in Zwift companion, but it's always greyed out or inactive. This occurs when just riding on my own not in any structured ride or even when doing group rides like Tour De Zwift,which I assume is a non-competitive ride so should fall under the category for the coffee stop to apply.

Maybe it's only available at a certain level?

https://zwiftinsider.com/coffee-stop/

First 30 minutes? I used one on T d Z stage 1 and have seen lots of others.

I will check again but I'm pretty sure the icon was inactive the entire ride. Finished up Stage 3 yesterday so will check at Stage 4.

I have found that the icon may be greyed out in the companion app, but available on the computer menu screen.

I’ve seen it greyed out a lot more than I would expect and can’t really explain it. If you are on a laptop you can hover the mouse over it and it will tell you how long it’s inactive for.

Good advice, I admit I'm looking at the companion app because it's on the bike and easiest to interact with but will make a point of checking the laptop as well. May laptop is out of reach as I'm riding so would never think to try and control things from there but worth the effort for the coffee break.

My Windows desktop has a second bluetooth keyboard on a small table next to my bike. (I have two monitors, so one gets turned at a angle for the trainer sessions.) The wired keyboard and this second keyboard are both active all the time. I use the second keyboard (and move the wireless mouse over too) in Zwift for the 0-9 viewpoint changes, and a few more key functions.

I watched some videos about zwift racing for reasons I can't articulate. In one of them, people were taking coffee breaks during a race. Was that a glitch?

I was able to use it the other day during a robo pace ride, but it told me that I could only do that after 30 minutes of riding. It gives you I think 3 minutes off the bike, but I only needed a minute to turn on the fan and get some water. Out of curiosity I tried again later in the ride and it was counting down another 30 minutes. I thought maybe I could still reclaim my 2 minutes even before that but I couldn't. I'll have to check when I'm doing the TdZ ride in the next day or two whether it works the same. My bike is set up in a room that is cold in the house, so I don't turn on the fan immediately but wait until I've warmed up on the bike for about 10 minutes so this doesn't help that much. I instead raced ahead of the group, left myself some good momentum on the flywheel, and turned on the fan. The trainer flywheel was still spinning when I got back on so I was still pretty far ahead.

On bot groups, I see it become active after 30 min (as others have noted). Why would you need it if riding solo? If you need to stop for something, just do it and let your avatar sit in one place until you're ready to resume riding.

My trainer is in my detached garage, and I have a similar situation where I don't always want the fan until I'm warmed up. I recently added a remote-controlled on/off switch. It's great.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07WX2NBWR

you need one of these. i've got one that is about 50 years old and i use it specifically for my fan. was my mom's and she used it for the Christmas tree back in the day.

https://www.amazon.com/Prime-Wire-Ca...2EALw_wcB&th=1

Ok, continue to ride and can't access the coffee cup. I guess the system is watching my health and has told me I drink enough coffee ha ha. I looked down at my desktop and see noting as well.

I like the idea of a remote for the fan as mine is an industrial fan and even on low is noisy and strong so like others, I start without the fan and then get off to turn it on. Sometimes when you want to chill or recovery ride I wish the fan was smaller. The remote sounds great.

I agree with EricF, if I'm riding solo I'm just going to stop and do what I want and get back on but during the Tour rides the coffee break would be nice.

Robo pace rides now have the Teleport button on the bottom icon strip. It looks like two map pushpins. Tap it, and it shows a list of all the bot speed groups. Pick one, and you get teleported to it, with the usual 10 second countdown.

I can warm up at an easy pace, then jump to a faster bot group. Or see how long I can hang on to an even faster group -- bot interval rides!
I like that the whole session is all one recording this way.
~~~

Fan: I have an old fleece zip for the start of rides with the fan on. Once I'm warmed up, the fleece is easy to take off and toss aside.

Yeah I got a floorstanding "on a pole" fan, almost silent and it has a little remote. So useful and not very expensive.

I have an old phone controlled outlet that I wanted to use for the fan, but over the years the wifi in my house has changed and the phone app couldn't find the switch. I tried to reprogram it but that required being on the 2.4ghz band, but the new wifi doesn't distinguish between it and the 5ghz band so I couldn't do that either. The router broadcasts both but you can't choose. There are still lots of things I could try to make it work but I haven't gone back to it.

I was not aware of the teleport feature. I'll have to check that out. :thumb:

seems zwift has added enough new features i think i'll need to check this all out. been getting harassed by zwift to try them again for 30 days. offer expiring at the end of the month.

I have not seen the coffee break active on the tour event rides. I have used it on the bot pacer rides a couple times. The teleport feature is actually more useful.

I Have my "pain cave" in my living room with the thermostat set at 68° F. I don't use a fan! I use a towel. I formerly used a box fan. I haven't noticed any difference. Moderate efforts and more I just sweat more.

My router had my network SSID name automatically on both the 2.4ghz and 5ghz bands. My phone always picked the 2.4 one. So I set up a second name with "5ghz" appended to it, same password. Then set the original name to be 2.4ghz only, and the new one 5ghz only. Now I can pick one or the other. I thought the 5ghz would be better, but it's blocked more by floors and heavy walls in the way of the signal. It's faster when I'm reasonably near the transmitter, and okay throughout the house.

Yeah 5GHz can carry more data per second thanks to the higher frequency (and wider channels) but the downside of that is more susceptibility to blockers.

My wifi mesh has the same SSID for 2.4 & 5 and not had an issue with any “2.4 only” devices.

Teleporting makes some even more strange looking strava ride maps, with straight lines connecting the teleported locations.

https://cimg9.ibsrv.net/gimg/bikefor...54388a6f82.jpg

That explains some of the maps I've seen in my Strava feed.

teleporting is nice. Just before they introduced it, I was riding with a robopacer group and they went right and I went left. There was no way I was going to catch them. Now I use it a lot. Start out with a slower group and teleport to a faster group when I warm up. Or teleport to a slower group when I get dropped.

All good, I found the coffee cup at 30 minutes, just like someone mentioned above. It doesn't last very long though, as I swear, I looked up at the screen for a minute or so and then it was gone before I could use it. No towel for me on that last ride.