Merit Fitness

Merit Fitness produce  a range of three affordable treadmills for the home market. They are a brand owned by JohnsonFitness, one of the largest fitness manufactures in the world.  Their other brands include: Horizon Fitness and AFG.  Merit is their economy line, and the prices reflect this with treadmills for under $450.

Pros and Cons of the Merit Brand:

Pros:

Cheap and simple Exercise machines

Simple Range they are light weight machines and easy to move and store.

Reasonably well made.  The parent company JohnsonFitness know what they are about and make products to a high standard.  Because they make so many they can seem to have a high level of faults.  However on average they are no worse than any other budget brand.  Merit just sell more.

Cons:

Very light in features – Workouts may be hard without music or cooling fans.

Short Warranties – If you want to ensure that your treadmill is going to last you may want to consider  a third party warranty to extend the 1 or 2 years offered by Merit on the motor and 90 day parts and labour offered.

Power:  The motors are very low powered. They also list their power output in THP.  I have struggled to find out what this means and its actually an aviation term.  In short THP is about 10% more than the standard Horse Power Measure as it takes into account drag.  To convert HP to the usual measurement of Continuous Horse Power (the amount of power a treadmill can deliver over a sustained period divide it by 2.  So the rating of 2.5 THP is more like 1.25CHP.  This is our absolute minimum power recommendation.

Size:  The running deck is very small.  All their treadmills have an 18″ deck and upto 52″ length.  You will only be able to do light jogging on these machines.

Summary:
For a low cost entry level machine they are OK.  If you are looking for a proper running machine then you will have to spend a little more.