About Us

Welcome to DecaWatts!

I’m Mark, co-founder of DecaWatts, and this is how a personal frustration with bike maintenance turned into the system we use today.

I spent years doing everything right. The cleaners, the degreasers, the careful routines, all of it.

Running oil, my chains never lasted more than a few thousand kilometers. Waxing finally worked, pushing chains past 10,000 km, but only at the cost of constant work and zero margin for error.

Everyone around me accepted that tradeoff. Either you ran oil because it was easy and quietly paid for it in worn cassettes and chainrings, or you committed to full hot-melt waxing at home and accepted the mess, the time, and the constant vigilance. That never sat right with me. There had to be a way to combine the ease of oil with the performance and savings of wax.

I tried solving it by rotating waxed chains and always keeping a fresh one ready. It helped, but it became just another chore layered on top of training. Even then, nothing was straightforward. After wet rides, I had to break chain links and re-wax immediately or risk rust. Maintenance was always sitting in the back of my mind when it should have been my riding.

The breaking point came after a wet ride. I got home exhausted, skipped rewaxing, and went to work. By the next day, the chain had already flash-rusted. One ride. One night. Visible damage. That was when I knew the system itself was broken.

Over the next six years, I refined a better one. Instead of rewaxing after every wet ride, I began topping up waxed chains with a wax-based drip lube, specifically Tru-Tension Tungsten All-Weather. It solved the immediate problem. I could ride in the rain, quiet the chain when it sounded dry, and keep riding without tearing everything apart.

But it introduced a new issue. Every time I reset a chain with fresh wax, that drip lube went straight into the wax pot and saturated it far faster than I was used to. Contamination was creeping back in.

Digging deeper into Zero Friction Cycling’s research, I realized the missing step was not better wax but better resetting.

I developed a multi-stage ultrasonic cleaning process to return chains to true bare metal before rewaxing, completely removing oils, drip-lube residue, and embedded contamination. After testing multiple industrial ultrasonic solutions, I landed on a process with the right balance of cleaning power, cost, and repeatability.

The result was the breakthrough.

Wax stayed pristine indefinitely. I could wax chains just once a month, top up with drip lube whenever needed, and only replace the wax actually used, not throw it out because it was saturated with dirt.

That was when it hit me. This was far too much work for any regular cyclist to commit to at home.

I had finally matched the ease of oil with the performance of wax, but in doing so, I had given myself more work than my original rotating-chain system ever required. The solution was technically perfect but practically impossible for most riders to adopt on their own.

So I asked a different question. What if this was not something every cyclist had to do themselves? What if I offered it as a service instead?

Doing this just for me was inefficient. Doing it for cyclists like me, riders tired of wasting money on drivetrains whether they rode road, gravel, or MTB, suddenly made sense. The work scaled. The value multiplied. DecaWatts stopped being a personal system and became something anyone could benefit from.

Today, our chains regularly exceed 10,000 km with only half the allowable wear before replacement, with projected lifespans of 16,000 to 20,000 km in dry conditions. Riders never have to wax at home again.

Instead, riders simply rotate two chains. Once a month, they ship one chain to DecaWatts and install the second. After wet rides or whenever the drivetrain sounds dry, they top up with the same wax-based drip lube I trust, Tru-Tension.

There is no stripping, no rewaxing, and no second-guessing. We completely reset each chain, return it to true bare metal, and send it back perfectly waxed every single time.

That is why DecaWatts exists. To deliver the longevity and efficiency of waxing without turning maintenance into a job.