Had to pick between two chain lubes for the shop, here's what settled it

We run a small repair shop in Columbus and I kept going back and forth on which bulk lube to stock. Wet lube handles the road grime better but drags in dry weather, the dry lube is cleaner but needs way more frequent application. I bought a gallon of each and ran a 6 week test on our own fleet of rentals, tracking how often we had to reapply and how dirty the drivetrains got. Wet lube won on time between services, we went from weekly to biweekly on most bikes. Dry lube lost because customers complained about squeaks after a few days. Anyone else settled this by just picking one and sticking with it?

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nathanbennett24d agoTop Commenter

Started running the same test a few years back at our shop, but one of the mechanics kept swapping the bottles when I wasn't looking because he thought the dry stuff smelled better. Took me two weeks to figure out why the data made no sense at all. Once I caught him, I had to scrap the whole thing and just buy a case of the wet lube out of spite. Honestly, the smell thing is real though, some of those dry lubes have this weird chemical vanilla thing going on that makes the whole workspace smell like a bad candle shop. Ended up sticking with wet lube for the rentals too, but we still put dry lube on the display bikes just so the floor doesn't feel like a grease pit when customers touch the wheels. Tbh, the real lesson was that nobody cares about your test results if the product makes the shop smell like a bakery.