Disappointing battery life

Baoran In case you haven't tried this... Hold down the power button until the watch powers off (like 20 seconds). Then turn the watch on and charge if fully.

See if that helps.

If not, I'd say there is probably something wrong with your watch and you should reach out to Garmin Support. I say that because I get nearly the advertised battery life with my 5+. Of course it varies upon my usage, so is obviously shortened when I do a lot of activities...and navigating... and listening to music. I do see PABD, but it stops after a couple of hours.

I am starting to think that the watch is keeping gps turned on always. It seems to know where I am immediately when I go to the map without delay and that is why the battery is being drained that fast. Is there anything I can do about that?

Edit: It took about 10 hours to drain 50% today so it is not too far off from 18 hours of gps.

I am starting to think that the watch is keeping gps turned on always.

This is my thought as well. For two days when I was not working out my watch was consistently at 0.4% drain per hour. For 48 hours it only dropped 20% from 72% to 52%. Then I did an outdoors run after which I completely shut off the watch after it had synced (by holding power button for 30 secs) and then switched it on again, however the battery drain was then 1.8% per hour until I needed to recharge it around 15%.

So yeah there is definitely two "modes" in the watch, where one of the modes keeps the battery drainage at around the same level as if the GPS was always on or "near-always" on.

I'm sure this has been said before, but worth a go - What watch face are you using? I've noticed that some watch faces cause massive battery drain, probably because of the rate they are polling various services.

Some third party watch faces are terrible in terms of battery usage.

This is my thought as well. For two days when I was not working out my watch was consistently at 0.4% drain per hour. For 48 hours it only dropped 20% from 72% to 52%. Then I did an outdoors run after which I completely shut off the watch after it had synced (by holding power button for 30 secs) and then switched it on again, however the battery drain was then 1.8% per hour until I needed to recharge it around 15%.

So yeah there is definitely two "modes" in the watch, where one of the modes keeps the battery drainage at around the same level as if the GPS was always on or "near-always" on.

It does look like I have the same problem. Watch has been replaced by Garmin. The battery drain appears to be okay. However, when on long runs, such as today, the watch appears to be draining as if I was still in running mode. Something is clearly running in the background and taking power.

GillesBuk , nothing to do with watch faces, this is the post-activity battery drain issue that many people are seeing (myself included, on stock watch face). Often, after an activity battery drain continues for hours [often 6+ hours] before stabilising. In my case, when stable drain is around 0.3% as advertised, and also during the activity the numbers seem on par - it's just the period AFTER an activity that's my cause for concern.

I have detailed logs from the past month showing this issue, if I can get around to formatting them and posting them here (although I don't think there's any dispute that this is an issue for some people, although for how many I don't know - it's possible that many people don't even notice unless they examine their usage carefully in the hours after a run). If it's not an issue for everybody, then from what I've read on this thread there's no obvious cause (all the usual change-your-watch-face, disable-wifi, sensor, screen brightness, bt suggestions have been tried and don't offer any explanation).

One thing that I'm not sure is connected (or maybe a completely different issue) is that a reboot of my phone sometimes corrects high battery drains. Not always though, which makes me think that there are several issues at play here, and hard to pin down precisely when they occur.

Making awesome watches, the technical part, is one but developing great software is something else and Garmin is not great at that.

Last Friday I sold my 2 year old F5 and immediately got a F5S+ Sapphire which I returned the next day as it drained 3% per hour even after multiple factory resets.

I took the F5+ Sapphire Titanium which does better but not great yet with 0.8% per hour so far. But I'll give it a few days but not worried yet.

The F5 I had lasted easily 21 days in smartwatch mode!


Btw, the F5+ST is the most awesome looking version imho so I'm happy despite all the hassle with swapping watches ...

Forgot to mention, I ran 2 laps with the F5+ST, yesterday and today, 20 minutes each with GPS in ultratec mode. I'm now 25 hours in on 1 charge, and the battery shows 85%. Seems decent to me, being on the first charge still. Usually battery life improves after a few charges so let's see!

I'm on my 5th day of owning the Fenix 5, and have fully charged it 4 times. I use ~60% of the battery in 24 hours, and have wi-fi, and auto-sync turned off, have completely disabled the automatic backlight, I'm using the default watch face, and turned off notifications completely. The watch isn't even a smartwatch now, since it doesn't get notifications. I'm also not playing music or doing anything obviously demanding.

Is this just a faulty battery or level indicator? There's no way I should need to charge the watch every day, especially since it takes nearly 2 hours to charge.