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Disappointing battery life

I have just upgraded from a Fenix 5 to a Fenix 5 plus and so far I am finding the battery life to be a lot less than I would expect.

I used to get nearly 2 weeks battery life out of the Fenix 5 but so far the Fenix 5 plus has used 25% in 2 days, both watches are set up and used exactly the same.

I know the Fenix 5 plus is supposed to have slightly less battery life but at this rate it is not even going to last a week.

Does anyone know if this will improve if I cycle the battery a couple of times or if this is normal for this model

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0 NeilJonesOnline over 7 years ago

I've been trying to see if the wifi connection initiated after an activity was not being closed down after the activity was transferred, but for some reason I can't find the f5's MAC address (found under Settings>About) in my DHCP client list. Even if it has disconnected, it should still have a lease allocated to it. I'll try again after I upload an activity later today, but has anyone else tried looking at this?

0 davidhurst over 7 years ago

About a week ago on this forum Garmin said it would be directly contacting some people who have posted here about battery problems. Can anyone or Garmin confirm that this has happened and if so the current state of the investigation?

0 Baz 8755 over 7 years ago

Bored on a Saturday morning so I just did some geeky maths on the past weeks battery performance of my F5+

It was fully charged @ 22:30 on 7-July, it is now 10:10 on 14-July so has been running for 6.5 days

During this period I did one 30 minute indoor session (no GPS so we will discount this for now)
I also did 5 walking activities totalling 4 hours.

So using Garmin stated figures I calculate that watch mode consumption should be 100/(24*12) % per hour, 0.347222% per hour
GPS mode should be 100/18 % per hour, 5.555556% per hour

My scenario given these calculations would suggest that I should have used 6.5 days watch mode plus 4 GPS hours % battery
6.5*24*0.347222 + 4*5.555556 = 76.38886%

My watch is currently showing 14% so it is currently 10% less than it should be, but don't forget I have excluded a 30 minute non GPS activity from this calculation which must have a little more drain than watch mode.

Given the apparent post activity drain I would expect the figures to get worse the more individual activities performed.

The following should be noted for completeness
- I am running a standard face showing steps, calories & battery
- I do not have any non standard faces installed
- The 30 minute non GPS activity was using a Garmin basic HRM and consisted of 10 min elliptical, 10 min cycling & 10 min rowing
- I am using standard GPS setting (No GLANOSS or Galileo
- I am not displaying maps
- I have Wi-Fi configured but do not have it set to auto update
- I use BT to auto update via Google Nexus 5 android phone

0 zaragozamj over 7 years ago

About a week ago on this forum Garmin said it would be directly contacting some people who have posted here about battery problems. Can anyone or Garmin confirm that this has happened and if so the current state of the investigation?

Yes, I've been contact by email twice by Garmin with questions about how I have my watch configured, some configuration changes to try, and lastly for a zipped copy of the Garmin folder. (This last one I haven't complied with because currently I'm on a Mac, which doesn't recognize the watch as a mass storage device.)

0 Former Member over 7 years ago

I'm really starting to think that most, if not all, of the issue is that the watch doesn't actually know what charge the battery has. I needed to charge my watch last night so I could use it this morning, but I also didn't have time to fully charge it before leaving so I pulled it off the charger before it was fully charges. The following is the what happened over the next 12 hours.

I took it off the charger at 45%
I rebooted the watch and the battery level jumped to 52%
I slept with the watch on and woke up 8 hours later to the watch reading 59%.
I decided to reboot the watch again and the battery now shows 80%.

I'm not sure if this is a hardware or software issue but it's my understanding that the battery should only be "charging" when plugged in. That is unless I somehow have some special ability to charge batteries.

0 Former Member over 7 years ago

Yes, the battery meter on this thing is seriously broken. It shows random values depending on how he watch feels. I supposed it's randomly distributed around actual charge level, but occasionally it can be pretty far of. I take any statements such as "my watch only used 6% during last 24 hours" with a grain of salt. It only means the non-functioning battery meter went down by 6% in the aforementioned time which, really, doesn't mean anything. If this cannot be fixed by firmware, though, it seriously limits usability of this watch.

I still thing there is another issue here at play which is post-activity batter drain. But these two combined mean we have another alpha-release from Garmin pretending to be actual finished product. I should have known better.

That said, I'd love the ability to charge my watch while asleep. :-D

0 Baz 8755 over 7 years ago

Having stated that my battery was 14% at 10:10 yesterday morning it was still at the same level at 18:00 last night. I even rebooted to see if it would correct, but it did not.

However upon waking this morning at 6:00 the battery has massively dropped to 5%

I agree with the comments regarding bad battery reporting and post activity drain.

0 davidhurst over 7 years ago

A couple of days ago, I tried the jimoestman recommendation of letting the battery run flat and charging overnight to see if it recalibrates the battery meter. It is early days, but I am seeing a definite improvement. GPS mode consumes about 5% of battery power per hour now (much lower than before) while smartwatch mode seems to be in the region of 9% per 24 hours. The former is about right and the latter still a tad too much according to the specs provided by Garmin and the calculations done by BAZ8875 above. My measurements suggest that battery life in smartwatch mode is - or appears to be - about 13% shorter than it should be, which is in line with BAZ8875's observations. However, this is in, my case, a big improvement on what I have seen until now. For the first time I also saw a sudden post-activity drain of a couple of per cent too.

0 rob-tech over 7 years ago

I observed the same as davidhurst, it's definitely close to the specs now in smartwatch mode. I'm 8 days in with approximately 36% battery life left (4 strength workouts with chest strap - totalling 4 hours and 40 min and 24/7 wear) on the second charge since new. Maybe it is the battery meter needing a couple of cycles to become accurate. There still seems to be minor post activity drain even after non-gps workouts, however.

Overall, the battery life is reasonable and not terrible like I initially thought. I initially considered that I may have a faulty battery.

0 Former Member over 7 years ago

Observation: Different battery specsin different markets?

I noticed today that the Fenix 5 Plus box in Singapore have a specification of 10 days of battery in Smart Watch mode, and 18 hours with GPS.

Meanwhile, on the box of my watch bought in Norway, it says 12 hours of "Smart Watch" mode. This is also the case on the US product page.

For comparison: [TABLE="border: 1, cellpadding: 1, width: 500"]
[TR]
[TD]Fenix 5 Plus[/TD]
[TD]Smart Watch Mode[/TD]
[TD]GPS[/TD]
[TD]GPS + Music[/TD]
[TD]UltraTrac[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Garmin US Overview page[/TD]
[TD]10 days[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD]8 h[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Garmin US Specs page[/TD]
[TD]12 days[/TD]
[TD]18 h[/TD]
[TD]8 h[/TD]
[TD]42 h[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Garmin Norway Overview page[/TD]
[TD]12 days[/TD]
[TD]19 h[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Garmin Norway Specs page[/TD]
[TD]12 days[/TD]
[TD]18 h[/TD]
[TD]8 h[/TD]
[TD]42 h[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Garmin Singapore Overview page[/TD]
[TD]10 days[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD]7 h[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Garmin Singapore Specs page[/TD]
[TD]10 days[/TD]
[TD]18 h[/TD]
[TD]7 h[/TD]
[TD]38 h[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]

The Singapore specs are the most conservative ones. Note that the box itself has 10 hours on it, whereas mine purchased in Norway, have 12 hours.