As I said in my post on Sunday – I managed to get a good cloud of smoke come out of our treadmill. I was worried it was off warranty and it would essentially be scrap but found out it is still on parts warranty but not on labor. Awesomely we found out today they are sending us out a new deck and belt as well as the components that fried but unfortunately a couple of the parts are back ordered and I probably won’t get everything until the end of March.
I saw back in the fall what a few missed weeks on the treadmill can do for my speeds and I didn’t want that to happen heading into my first race of the season in about 7 weeks or so. We also have realized that the machine we have just can’t seem to take the punishment I am giving it. Combine that with my wife using it 3-5 times a week as well and we ended up accepting that the machine just isn’t sufficient. We got a great deal on it and it has served us well but it’s not lasting through the pounding I gave it.
With that in mind we found a wicked deal locally on a Livestrong LS13.0T treadmill – great specs and a longer deck than our current machine and a better warranty. Still not health club quality but a step up from what we have and should be good for what I need it for. I think the longer deck alone will help to ensure the machine lasts longer as I won’t be pounding down the same spot as much.
The deal was very limited time and we thought that the current treadmill would be completely off warranty so we picked one up and got it set up. Both my wife and I have used it now and seems to work very nicely. (it is important to note that we got both the old and new treadmill at such good prices that the total is less than buying one with equivalent specs from elsewhere.)
…But what to do about the old one? Since we now know they are sending us out parts for the old one and we will be able to fix it up this leaves us with 2 functioning treadmills (or will have 2 at the end of March when we get the parts). With some creative use of space we have found we can have both treadmills set up in the alcove where we had our current one – so once we get the original one fixed we are going to leave them both set up. Basically my wife will use the old one and it should last significantly longer without it having to deal with me. And I will use the new one that is built a bit stronger and with longer distance runners in mind and hopefully that means it will last longer as well (it also has a 2 year parts and labor warranty that hopefully I don’t have to take advantage of).
So the hope is that what will happen is that we can get at least 2-3 years out of both of these machines from where they stand now by splitting our running on the machines. At that point we can re-evaluate and if we are both still running strong and hard then we can seriously look at getting a near gym quality machine.
Ugh…I can’t believe we now have 2 treadmills.
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