Disappointing battery life

wait few more cycles,lets sa 8 and if no change, go fo rma

Hi,
I have exactly the same issue. Battery drain of about 1% per hour just in watchface mode. No wifi, no gps, only bt connected to my smartphone. In summary my full charged watch lasts for about four days only. I contacted Garmin via their service website (RMA) and got a pretty interesting response from them! The original email is in german, so I try to translate it into english as accurate as possible:

"Dear ...,
thank you for your request.

We received occasional reports, which describe your exact issue.

The related development departments in the US are aware of that situation already. The colleagues there are examining the issue and working on a solution.

In the meantime, please be patient.

Currently we cannot make any statement when and how there will a solution available.
[...]"

For me, that sounds like there is a hardware issue with a certain batch of watches! Overall the replay from garmin is quite unsatisfying. I called my local dealer and he suggests to wait another weeks and ask back to garmin again.

My only concern is, if they replace my watch but don't have any clue about the real issue, I will get another faulty watch in the end.

Has anyone of you got similar responses from garmin?

I think they have a quality control issue. I had two Fenixes, 5 and 5X plus (bought a month ago) and both were affected by this. I returned 5X plus and sent the 5 to Garmin service center. Now I am waiting almost 30 days for Garmin’s response. I suspect they will miss 30 days period and return my money back because they don’t have a solution yet.

BTW: a friend have a F5 and lasts about 2 weeks as advertised. He bought it two months ago.

14 days and still at 20%. No GPS other than somr quick connects. Constants mobile connection during the day.

I'm happy.

You guys had me really concerned and almost made me reconsider getting a Plus Fenix, but I am happy to say that battery life is really good for me.
I have had an European watch for the past two months, initially on 5.10, then the beta (I think it was 5.53?) and now 6.0.
BT/WiFi/HR always on, notifications off, 20% backlight.

The average for the past exactly 120 hours is 0.44%/hr, which includes 40 minutes bike, 5.5 hours snowboarding.

Battery life so far is about 8-9 days with 10 half hour bike sessions (30 minutes commute each way, 4 days a week).
Just did one of the commutes, went from 51% to 49% at the end,
1 full day of about 7-8 hours mtb tracking takes me down to about 30-35% and then lives for another 3 days commuting.

There is a small amount of drain after activity - Just did one of the 30 minute commutes, went from 51% to 49% when I stopped it and then it was 47% an hour or so later.
I am pretty sure that it's at least partially, if not mostly, due to the data transfer while syncing. It's bigger after long activities (more data points) and if I have Connect open while syncing I can see that the longer activities can take a good minute or two, if not more to sync. Never been more than 2-3%.

All in all - really happy with the battery life.

I just picked a F5+ up off eBay last week. It was about 56% charged when I received it and I charged it up to full and wasn’t impressed with the battery life. That initial charge lasted from Friday through Wednesday with HR tracking, connected to my phone, and about 3 hours of GPS-Galileo and a couple of treadmill runs. Drain during GPS sessions wasn’t bad but in watch mode it was horrible even before I did the first GPS run and after re-starting after the watch after a run.

After perusing this thread I decided to let that charge cycle run it’s course by it letting go until it died and then charging overnight. I let it charge overnight, about 12 hours, and this morning it was saying 100% but dropped to 98% as soon as I disconnected it. During the course of the day in watch mode it’s been going down 1% about every 2.5 hours so about 0.42% per hour instead of the 0.33% that would be expected to meet the far end of the stated spec. I meant to get out for an outdoor run this evening to see what that brought but I think I’ll be hitting the bike trainer instead since it’s already dark and windy to boot. (Won’t be using the watch for that though after reading about the random power spikes)

Has anyone from Garmin already officially commented on this matter? 6 months after release of the device and 38 pages into a forum topic one would think Garmin would at least have an ETA on a fix. Unless this is simply a botched release and Garmin expects us to pony up another €700 for a Garmin 6 to have a proper battery in our device?

I am assuming at least one issue here has already been reported to Garmin? If not I was going to email but not sure of the address as it's been a while since I last reported a potential bug.

Would likely just report the incorrect battery reading during/end of charging (says 100% when actually much lower and vice versa) and for me and some others what appears to be post activity GPS drain. Battery (in general), is fine for me when in normal or smartwatch mode. Easily over a week with activities, prob over 2 without.

Has anyone from Garmin already officially commented on this matter? 6 months after release of the device and 38 pages into a forum topic one would think Garmin would at least have an ETA on a fix. Unless this is simply a botched release and Garmin expects us to pony up another €700 for a Garmin 6 to have a proper battery in our device?

Garmin have contacted few of us but I suspect many of us (including myself) have given up hope and just live with the reduced battery life (P.A.D. in my case), I am not happy that I bought this device on release date as an upgrade to my Fenix 5 (which had amazing battery life) but I cannot see myself using anything else. I would expect that they should have found the issue by now, be it software or hardware and either patched it or replaced the defective units. They did offer to exchange my unit but when I asked if it was a known hardware issue they said they did not know, so I asked them to contact me again when they had established that a hardware swap would fix the issue....still waiting.

On a brighter note they did eventually fix the WiFi issue on my Index Scale after nearly a year, so there is a slim chance.