Disappointing battery life

I did a reboot of my 5S+ and did not connect Bluetooth or pair it to my Stryd or HRM. Also no WiFi. Got 0.5%/hr battery drain. Fantastic!

Did a reboot and made a Bluetooth connection to the Garmin Connect mobile app, enabling notifications. Battery burn rate dropped to a miserable 1.8%/Hr.

Previously with Bluetooth + pairing with Stryd and HRM the burn rate was 2.8%/hr.

I did a reboot of my 5S+ and did not connect Bluetooth or pair it to my Stryd or HRM. Also no WiFi. Got 0.5%/hr battery drain. Fantastic!

Did a reboot and made a Bluetooth connection to the Garmin Connect mobile app, enabling notifications. Battery burn rate dropped to a miserable 1.8%/Hr.

Previously with Bluetooth + pairing with Stryd and HRM the burn rate was 2.8%/hr.

Why do external sensors appear to be affecting battery life when they should only be searched for and activated during an activity tracking?

Disabling daily activity tracking (steps and sleep) and the heart rate sensor will improve battery life and if you don't care much about these features I'd do away with them. I'd also advise against the super busy looking watch faces that have loads of data fields. I installed a simple 'Breitling' face that shows time, date, notifications, and bluetooth, and I've noticed a difference in battery life. I see to be around the 18 hours in GPS mode promised by Garmin.

I stripped out power consuming features except activity tracking, backlight and the stock watchface. I changed the following:

Phone bluetooth to OFF
Wifi to Auto Upload OFF
HRM Strap to OFF from SEARCHING

The watchface has altitude, calories, heart rate and date/time with seconds.

With these 3 changes my drain goes from from apx 15%/day to 7.2%/day in watch mode. Using 24/7 except to shower.

Does 7.2%/day in watch mode sound fine with the regular 5+ with the above settings, and not touching any keys, basically what is everyone else getting? Someone earlier on in the thread mentioned far lower consumption with Bluetooth so I'm worried the battery in my unit is bad.

Anyway, I need bluetooth for syncing and notifications, and the HRM strap should be enabled as it is my understanding that the watch only searches for external sensors when starting a workout. Wifi I could do without so I'm hoping this is responsible for most of the drain.

Ok things just got even stranger. So when my watch was at 3% this morning I tried to reboot it but since the battery level was so low it would not start. As stated earlier when I plugged the watch into the computer the battery level immediately jumped to 10% causing me to doubt whether it was really at 3%. I then let the watch charge for about 10 minutes and the level read 19%, however when I unplugged the watch the battery level immediately jumped to 25%. I just got back from my 55 minute (GPS + Galileo) walk and the battery level still read 25%. Thinking that the charge was stuck I rebooted the watch only to have the battery now read 29%. What is going on here? Is the battery meter that messed up?

Last night the battery issue got even stranger. As usual my battery only lasted a few days so I gave it another full charge by letting it reach 100% and then keeping it plugged in for an additional hour. I decided to reboot it immediately after unplugging it and the battery level dropped to 89%. So I plugged it back in and after a few minutes the battery jumped back to 100% so I unplugged and rebooted to see the battery move to 90%. I repeated this same process for every percentage from 90%-100%. It's like the battery meter couldn't distinguish between a full charge and anything above 90% so it would just jump to 100% every time the charge would increase by 1%. What made the matter worse is that I don't think the watch charges once the meter thinks it's at 100% so if I had left the watch at 100% without a reboot I would have actually missed out on that last 10% of a charge.

Last night the battery issue got even stranger. As usual my battery only lasted a few days so I gave it another full charge by letting it reach 100% and then keeping it plugged in for an additional hour. I decided to reboot it immediately after unplugging it and the battery level dropped to 89%. So I plugged it back in and after a few minutes the battery jumped back to 100% so I unplugged and rebooted to see the battery move to 90%. I repeated this same process for every percentage from 90%-100%. It's like the battery meter couldn't distinguish between a full charge and anything above 90% so it would just jump to 100% every time the charge would increase by 1%. What made the matter worse is that I don't think the watch charges once the meter thinks it's at 100% so if I had left the watch at 100% without a reboot I would have actually missed out on that last 10% of a charge.

Might be like the Apple iPhone or a lot of electronics that register 100% at 90%. The logic is it saves battery life by not having people constantly top them off. LiIon degrades much faster above 80% charge and below 30% charge.

Might be like the Apple iPhone or a lot of electronics that register 100% at 90%. The logic is it saves battery life by not having people constantly top them off. LiIon degrades much faster above 80% charge and below 30% charge.

Maybe that's it, but the battery life is so bad right now that I would prefer it if the watch actually gave me a full charge. This last charge only lasted about 4 days with a mere 4.5 hours of GPS+Galileo activities, and about 1 hour of strength training activities. From what I read the charge should be lasting longer than that.

What made the matter worse is that I don't think the watch charges once the meter thinks it's at 100% so if I had left the watch at 100% without a reboot I would have actually missed out on that last 10% of a charge.

I was playing with USB tester yesterday when charging the watch. When charging from near empty, the cycle for my watch is something like this:

• will charge at around 140mA for most of the charge cycle (2+ hours from near empty)
  
• the current will start dropping at some point. I don't know exactly where, but I know when the watch was showing 80% charge, the current was only around 40mA
  
• as was confirmed by me and others in this thread, the battery indicator will jump from ~85% to 100%. At this point current would be around 20mA
  
• The charging current will continue dropping afterwards, going down to 10mA or possibly lower (I don't think my equipment is accurate enough to distinguish between these).
  

So no, the watch will continue charging slowly even after it shows 100%. It will reach cutoff point some time later or not at all. Which might confirm the theory that it simply protects the battery and shows 100% prematurely.

As a side note, this will supply around 300mAh at 5V, which is slightly higher then what my 5 (non-plus) would take. I am under impression that battery in these should be the same, but there's so man factors at play here (accuracy, charging current on 5+ is slightly higher, which means higher loss due to heat) that it doesn't really make for reasonable comparison.

I will be reaching out to a few of you via the email address that is attached to your forums display names to see if we can get more information on this subject.