The honest answer in 30 seconds
Pick the Concept2 RowErg, every time. At $1,650 CAD with a 5-year frame and 2-year parts warranty through Concept2 Canada, it is the only machine RCA, OUA and CSSRA selection treats as a valid 2k. Argonaut RC, Hanlan, Don RC, Brentwood College, St Catharines RC, Burnaby Lake RC and Leander Boat Club in Hamilton each run fleets of 8 to 30 RowErgs alongside their Hudson Boatworks shells. The WaterRower A1 at $1,995 CAD is gorgeous Welland-shipped oak furniture you can train on, but the score never slots into the Concept2 World Rankings. The Hydrow Wave at $3,995 CAD plus a $60 CAD monthly subscription is a streaming cardio device with a paddle attached, rare in Canadian boathouses, useless for selection testing.
Quick comparison: the three machines side by side
| What matters in a Canadian boathouse | Concept2 RowErg | WaterRower A1 | Hydrow Wave |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sticker price (CAD, single machine) | $1,650 CAD (Standard) / $1,890 CAD (Tall) | $1,995 CAD (S4 Bluetooth Monitor) | $3,995 CAD plus $60 CAD/month subscription |
| Resistance system | Spinning fan with damper lever, drag set in software | Paddle pulling through a sealed water tank | Magnet brake under software control |
| Stroke feel against a single scull | Closest match of the three by a wide margin | Soft catch, pleasant draw, lacks the bite of a boat | Hollywood smoothing for the camera angle |
| Data export | PM5 to ErgData to the Concept2 Online Logbook, RCA-recognised | S4 to WaterRower Connect app, no shared logbook | Locked inside the Hydrow account, no open API |
| Acceptance for RCA, OUA and CSSRA selection | Yes, the default and only fully recognised score | No, the score does not map to Concept2 World Rankings | No, never been accepted for Canadian selection |
| Warranty in Canada | 5-year frame, 2-year parts, supported by Concept2 Canada | 5-year frame, 3-year components | 5-year frame, 1-year parts and electronics |
| Where it earns its keep | Every Canadian club, varsity programme, CSSRA prep school | A condo or living room where the machine doubles as furniture | Home cardio in front of a 16-inch streaming class |
Pricing verified May 17, 2026, direct from Concept2 Canada (orders ship from Morrisville VT through CBSA), WaterRower Canada and Hydrow Canada. GST/HST and shipping to a typical Ontario boathouse address included where listed. Monthly subscription separated out.
Concept2 RowErg: the indoor standard from St Catharines to Elk Lake
Image: Concept2
Before the long-form analysis, a one-glance Canadian fleet table for the three machines, with CAD pricing, warranty backed by Concept2 Canada, real club use, and selection acceptance across Rowing Canada Aviron, OUA and CSSRA:
| Machine | Price CAD | Warranty (Canada) | Canadian club use | RCA / OUA / CSSRA score acceptance |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Concept2 RowErg | $1,650 | 5-year frame, 2-year parts via Concept2 Canada | Fleets of 8 to 30 at Argonaut, Hanlan, Don RC, Brentwood, St Catharines, Burnaby Lake, Leander Hamilton | Yes for all three |
| WaterRower A1 | $1,995 | 5-year frame, 3-year components | Occasional single unit at boutique studios, never a club fleet | No for RCA, OUA or CSSRA |
| Hydrow Wave | $3,995 + $60/mo | 5-year frame, 1-year parts | Vanishingly rare in Canadian boathouses | No for RCA, OUA or CSSRA |
Concept2 is family-owned out of Morrisville, Vermont, where Dick and Pete Dreissigacker started building hand-laid carbon oars in 1976. The first Model A ergometer rolled off the line in 1981. Today the RowErg is the testing standard in every Canadian boathouse worth the name, from Lake Banook in Halifax through Hanlan and Don RC on the Toronto waterfront, down the QEW to Henley Island in St Catharines, across to Vesta in Winnipeg, on to Burnaby Lake outside Vancouver, and out to Elk Lake in Victoria where the national team trains. Concept2 Canada handles warranty, replacement parts and shipping out of an Ontario distribution arrangement, with a 5-year frame and 2-year parts cover and same-week shipping on chains, handles and footstraps.
Why every Canadian coach trusts the PM5 monitor
The PM5 is the reason a coach at Brock can compare a January 2k to one rowed at Western three weeks earlier and trust the comparison. Every stroke gets recorded against the athlete: split, watts, stroke rate, distance, drag factor, heart rate paired over Bluetooth or ANT plus. Pull the data into the free Concept2 Online Logbook through ErgData on a phone, or sync straight to a USB stick at the machine. That same logbook feeds the Concept2 World Rankings, the only ranking system Rowing Canada Aviron and the OUA actually look at when scouting U Sports prospects. Row HQ ingests Concept2 CSV exports today and a direct Logbook API pull is queued on the next sprint, so coaches at McGill or U of T stop typing scores by hand off paper sheets pinned to a boathouse wall. See the ergometer glossary entry for the long-form definition.
What drag factor actually means for a Canadian selection test
The damper lever is a flap that meters airflow to the flywheel. What a coach reads is the drag factor, the deceleration rate the PM5 calculates between strokes. Canadian programmes typically peg senior openweight men at 120 to 130 and senior women at 105 to 120, locked per athlete and recorded against every test piece so a January 2k at Hanlan is directly comparable to a May 2k at Brock. WaterRower has no equivalent number, since drag is set by water volume in the tank. Hydrow chooses resistance internally and never exposes it. If a head coach wants a single, defensible 1st VIII boating decision out of fall trials, the comparable data only exists on a Concept2. The drag factor calculator sets the right number per athlete in seconds.
Why one RowErg outlives a generation of squad captains
Concept2 publishes the 5-year frame warranty, with 2-year parts cover through Concept2 Canada. The reality on the floor of a Canadian boathouse is longer. The fleet at Don Rowing Club in Mississauga still includes Model D machines bought in the early 2000s, refreshed with new chains, handles, seats and monorails over the years, every wear part replaceable for under $90 CAD. Concept2 still ships parts for machines built in the 1990s. A treasurer pricing 12 RowErgs at $1,650 CAD each, amortised across the 15 years a club gym realistically gets out of them, lands at roughly $110 CAD per machine per year. No competing machine, water tank or streaming screen lasts long enough to make the maths even close.
Where the Concept2 lives in a Canadian training week
The RowErg anchors every structured week from September trials through the spring sprint season into a Royal Canadian Henley build. Run a recent split through the erg pace calculator for watts and projected distances, fire a sharp 6k through the 2k prediction tool to back out a credible Olympic-distance target, and percentile the result through the bodyweight-adjusted erg score so lightweight athletes are not buried in the open ranking. Log every piece into Row HQ training sessions by CSV today, with the Logbook API pull arriving on the next sprint. The complete indoor record book lives on Concept2 monitors: Josh Dunkley-Smith at 5:35.8, Henrik Stephansen at 5:56.7, Brooke Mooney at 6:21.1, all logged in the Concept2 Logbook. That alone is the answer.
It's the best all-round fitness machine in the world, and suitable for anybody, not just international athletes. No matter how hard I tried, I could never beat it. It never broke and it never let me down.
WaterRower A1: a beautiful piece of oak that loses every fleet decision
Image: WaterRower UK
The WaterRower A1 is the ash-framed water-tank machine you spot in Equinox studios, boutique hotel gyms and the occasional condo on the Toronto lakeshore. John Duke, a Yale-educated engineer who tried out for the US National Rowing Team in the 1980s, built the first prototype in 1988 in Warren, Rhode Island. The paddle pulls through a sealed acrylic tank of water, the catch feels closer to a boat than the air resistance on a Concept2, and the sound it makes on a long steady piece is genuinely meditative. As a standalone object it is a credible piece of furniture you can train hard on, at $1,995 CAD for the A1 trim with the S4 Bluetooth Monitor. None of that is the question a Canadian club is asking.
Why no Canadian club fleet has ever standardised on a WaterRower
The S4 monitor records time, distance, split and stroke rate. It does not record drag factor (there isn't one), does not export to the Concept2 Online Logbook, and does not produce a score the OUA, U Sports recruiting tables or CSSRA Championship trial sheet recognise. A 7:05 on a WaterRower at home and a 7:05 on a Concept2 in the boathouse are different efforts on different machines, ranked against nothing in common.
For a Canadian head coach, that breaks the whole point of an ergometer test. You can never compare a recruit from Brentwood College out west to a recruit from Ridley in St Catharines if one is on a Concept2 and the other on a WaterRower. You can never trend an athlete across an OUA build week. You can never pull a national-team-quality lightweight off a percentile band, because the percentile bands live on Concept2 World Rankings only. The machine is internally consistent, just isolated from every external benchmark a Canadian programme cares about.
When the WaterRower is actually the right answer
A WaterRower A1 belongs in the condo of a former St Catharines junior who finished out their racing career a decade ago, wants steady aerobic work three mornings a week, likes the water sound and the oak, and has no ambition to chase a percentile band. It belongs in a boutique studio in Yorkville running general-population classes that are not selecting for anything. A handful of Canadian clubs have one or two as variety units for masters members. No Canadian club has ever bought a WaterRower fleet as the primary testing platform, and none ever will, because nothing the machine produces feeds the systems Canadian rowing actually uses.
We are proud that WaterRower has become the Official Water Rowing Machine of British Rowing. Great Britain is currently the most successful rowing nation on the planet, and British Rowing are the driving force behind this success.
Hydrow Wave: streaming cardio dressed as a rowing machine
Image: Hydrow
Hydrow is a Boston-based connected fitness company that raised over USD 300m in venture money to do for indoor rowing what Peloton did for spin classes. The Wave is the smaller of two machines, with a 16-inch touchscreen, a magnet brake controlled by software, and a mandatory Hydrow Membership at around $60 CAD per month. Founder Bruce Smith was the head coach at Community Rowing Inc. in Boston before founding Hydrow in 2017. The hardware is well built and the on-demand class production value is genuinely good. None of that addresses the question a Canadian club is asking when it costs out a fleet of indoor rowers for a CSSRA prep school or an OUA varsity programme.
Why the Hydrow is the wrong tool for Canadian club training
The stroke profile is calibrated for entertainment, not for fidelity to a single scull at Henley Island. The catch is gentle by design, the drive is software-smoothed so it looks elegant on camera, and the recovery is engineered for pacing the next class instruction. A coach watching a junior train on a Hydrow will see them developing an early back swing, a soft catch and a hurried recovery, none of which translate to a Hudson 8+ on Lake Banook. There is no drag factor, no ErgData pipeline, no Concept2-compatible ranking, no path into the Concept2 World Rankings or any RCA selection trail.
Hydrow targets the home fitness buyer who wants a Peloton-equivalent in the rowing motion. That is a legitimate market and the product is well-engineered for it. The category mismatch with a club is total. A Canadian rowing club kitting out its gym with Hydrows would be like Cycling Canada equipping the velodrome with stationary bikes, technically the same human motion, totally disconnected from the sport. The proprietary data model, the per-machine subscription line on the budget, and the absent ranking pathway make a fleet decision impossible to justify.
When a Hydrow is the right call for a Canadian buyer
If a Don RC masters member wants a streaming cardio machine at home with guided classes, has the budget for the hardware and the recurring monthly fee, and accepts that any score produced will never enter the Concept2 Logbook or appear on a Royal Canadian Henley qualifying chart, the Hydrow Wave is a legitimate purchase for that brief. Do not put one in the club gym. Do not run a 2k test on it. Even the founder is candid about what the product is for, as the quote below confirms.
Yep, rowing can be really boring. I want Hydrow to be the antidote to those dull, clunky Concept2 machines you find in most gyms.
Three-year cost in Canadian dollars
Sticker price is the easy comparison. Total ownership over a realistic three-year window tells the story a Canadian club treasurer actually needs to see. Concept2 has zero subscription. WaterRower has zero subscription. Hydrow runs $720 CAD per machine per year on top of the hardware. The total picture, before any parts or repairs:
Three-year total cost of ownership (Canadian dollars)
Hardware plus mandatory subscription, May 2026 CAD pricing from Concept2 Canada, WaterRower Canada and Hydrow Canada.
Headline: the Hydrow Wave costs 3.7× the Concept2 RowErg over three years - almost entirely because of the mandatory subscription. The two non-subscription machines come within 21% of each other.
Stretch the horizon to the 15 years a Concept2 actually lives in a Canadian boathouse and the picture turns into a rout. A RowErg amortises to roughly $110 CAD per machine per year. The same Hydrow over 15 years, hardware plus $10,800 CAD of subscription, lands above $14,000 CAD per machine, and still cannot produce a score any OUA coach, CSSRA selector or RCA scout will look at.
What to buy, by use case
You run a Canadian rowing club at any level
Concept2 RowErg, full stop.
Standardise on Concept2 RowErgs. Buy as many as the gym can hold without blocking the bay doors. Never mix machines for testing. Replace handles, chains, seats and footstraps as they wear, and the same fleet will still be producing valid scores when the current commodore is on the alumni list.
You run a school or university programme
Concept2 RowErg.
Same answer, doubled. CSSRA prep schools need scores that compare against last year's 1st VIII trial sheet and against Brentwood and St Catharines recruits. OUA and U Sports varsity programmes need scores that feed recruiting conversations with the RCA NextGen pathway. Both live on Concept2 only. The machines also survive 40 teenagers a day crashing the seat to the catch.
You are a home rower chasing a 2k or a percentile band
Concept2 RowErg. WaterRower a distant second.
A Concept2 puts your numbers on the same scale as your club teammates and the global Concept2 World Rankings. If a Concept2 is genuinely out of reach (long backorders, condo space limits), a WaterRower is functional, but accept that no score you produce will slot cleanly into a Canadian club comparison.
You want a beautiful home cardio machine, no selection ambition
WaterRower A1.
If the machine sitting in the living room matters as much as the workout, and the score never has to be compared to anything outside the household, the WaterRower A1 is a satisfying piece of equipment to own and use.
You want streaming classes and motivation, not technique
Hydrow Wave, if the monthly fee fits.
Hydrow is a streaming cardio device built around the rowing motion. If that brief matches what you want from a home machine, the Wave is well-built and the classes are produced to a high standard. Just do not try to translate any of it into actual on-water rowing.
FAQs
Will Rowing Canada Aviron, OUA or CSSRA accept a WaterRower score?
No. Every Canadian selection process from CSSRA Championship trials in Welland through OUA Championship boating to RCA NextGen identification runs on Concept2 RowErg scores. The Concept2 Logbook is the only ranking infrastructure any of those processes connect to. A WaterRower score is internally honest and externally unrecognised in Canada.
Can Hydrow data feed my 2k progression chart?
Not in a way that matters. Hydrow does not export to the Concept2 Logbook, the resistance is software-set without a comparable drag factor number, and the stroke profile is calibrated for screen presentation rather than physiological fidelity to a single scull. Tracking 2k progression for a Canadian rowing context means at minimum a monthly Concept2 test, even if day-to-day training happens on a Hydrow.
What does each machine actually cost in Canadian dollars in 2026?
Concept2 RowErg in Canada lists at $1,650 CAD for the Standard model, $1,890 CAD for the Tall. WaterRower A1 with the S4 Bluetooth Monitor sits at $1,995 CAD. The Hydrow Wave is $3,995 CAD up front plus around $60 CAD per month for the mandatory Hydrow Membership, so $4,715 CAD in the first year and $720 CAD recurring every year after. Across three years: $1,650 vs $1,995 vs $6,155. Across a 15-year club fleet horizon, the Concept2 is the only one that makes financial sense.
Do any Canadian clubs actually run WaterRowers?
Almost none, and never as the primary testing fleet. A small handful of clubs from Halifax RC out east to Vesta RC in Winnipeg have a single WaterRower as a variety unit for masters members who prefer the water sound. The dominant fleet from Brentwood College out west to St Catharines in the Niagara region to Argonaut RC on the Toronto waterfront is Concept2, in numbers ranging from 8 ergometers at a smaller masters club up to 30 or more at the larger varsity programmes.
Which machine plays nicely with a club management system?
Concept2 exports clean data through ErgData to the Concept2 Online Logbook and as CSV. Row HQ ingests Concept2 CSV uploads today, and a direct Logbook API pull is queued for the next sprint so scores land against the right athlete in the coach dashboard automatically. WaterRower has its own app ecosystem with no shared logbook or ranking system. Hydrow keeps everything inside the Hydrow account with no public API. For any Canadian club running organised testing, only the Concept2 integrates sensibly with third-party tooling.
What are the current world record 2k times on a Concept2?
Heavyweight men: 5:35.8, set by Josh Dunkley-Smith of Australia in March 2018 at the Senior Australian Rowing Team Trials. Lightweight men: 5:56.7, set by Henrik Stephansen of Denmark in January 2013, ratified by Guinness World Records. Heavyweight women: 6:21.1, set by Brooke Mooney of the United States in 2021. All three sit in the Concept2 Online Logbook. No equivalent record exists for WaterRower or Hydrow because no ratified record book has ever covered those machines.
Keep every erg score in one place
Row HQ keeps each athlete's erg scores with their training record. Coaches can see progress without chasing spreadsheets. Set up your club free for up to 20 members.
- Jason and the Row HQ team
Sources & references
- Rowing Canada Aviron National Team Centre testing standards — Rowing Canada Aviron
- British Rowing teams up with WaterRower (2016 announcement, for historical context) — British Rowing
- Concept2 RowErg product page — Concept2
- Concept2 2025 Year in Review (141,735 new athletes, 79.7B m logged, 210+ countries) — Concept2 (accessed May 17, 2026)
- New 2k world record 5:35.8 (Josh Dunkley-Smith) — Concept2
- Concept2 Online Logbook — Concept2
- WaterRower A1 with S4 Bluetooth Monitor — WaterRower
- How much does a Hydrow cost? (Canada pricing breakdown) — Hydrow (accessed May 17, 2026)
- Hydrow founder Bruce Smith interview — Evening Standard
- Why Sir Steve Redgrave uses the Concept2 rower — Fitness Etc