How-to, if You allow

Former Member over 7 years ago

Hello all,

I am still struggling with battery draining on my F5S+. In a trial to switch off as much as possible I come to some questions:
-I switched off all Smart Notifications
-Then I went to the App on my phone and took away permission to watch calendar
Now the phone keeps coming back with information that a connected device wants to connect to my calendar and that's why my app would like to 'get it back'.

How can I understand where I forgot some settings which try to use Calendar. I actually do not want phone calls or any phone notifications on my watch. If the phone is near enough for my watch to receive the notification, then I will use the phone to handle calls, sms or whatever necessary.
But if the watch is trying to get this information from the phone, this means I loose battery for all this BT traffic, how do I get rid of it.
I also do not want the watch to try to use WiFi, so I just removed the network. I presume this makes sure that an activity will only be using BT to be send to the phone.

Playing music is a nice feature, but I found the quality to be lacking a lot. If I use my phone to play music, in PowerAmp there is a setting that it will use a buffer, so hick-ups will not happen. After using that settings, I have never had any hick-up anymore.
So this feature is not used by me anymore, also in a try to save battery power.

Nevertheless I seem to have some kind of settings which really drains the battery.
In the morning I charged to 100%. I have had one activity of 50min running with GPS+Galileo (BT headphones for alerts, no music, BT HR-Band from Polar) and saw that this seriously took battery, I had only 78% when I finished that activity. That was at around 07:00 in the morning. Now it is roughly 15:00, so the watch is 8 hours in smart watch mode and I am down to 61%.

17% in 8 hours does not sound good to me.

I need one more session of 50 min to get home, so I will end up at less than 40% in the evening. That simply does not allow me to start the next day with two activities planned. It would mean daily charging, :( For a new watch that simply sounds like wrong setup.

Therefor I really would like to find out what drains the battery here.
-GPS is off during the day, at least I hope so. Is there a way to check this?
-Display is off most of the day, Gestures are off and I am not using the interface too much
-Watch face Crystal
-BT seems to be on all of the time, I do not know if this is draining the battery, would like the syncing to be having an interval, no need for continuous syncing, but I also lack the idea if this can be set up like every 30 minutes of so

Any help on those 'How do I' is highly appreciated.

Best regards,
Ruud

0 TrippyZ over 7 years ago

Stage one is to try with BT off for a day (or a night) and seeing what the drain is then.

0 Former Member over 7 years ago

Hello TrippyZ,

I will try this asap and informhere about the result.
Does that mean that there is no way to tell the watch / app that I want the BT syncing to be 'say every xx minutes'?

0 carl.andersson over 7 years ago

There's a long thread on this forum about disspointing battery life. The TL:DR summary is that It appears there is a post activity battery draining bug so hopefully Garmin are working on that.
The second part is headphone use.
Garmin state battery life on a 5S with music/GPS is 4-5 hours.
I'm no expert but presumably it's the BT connection to the headphones that drains a lot of power, as you would assume the watch CPU decodes music efficiently.

So a 50min activity using up 20% of your battery is in line with Garmins stated 4-5 hour GPS/Music run-time

Even with the post activity bug fixed you will be charging more often than you probably expected.

You could either skip the audio feedback (the watch displays similar feedback anyway) or look at the 5+ which while bigger isn't a behemoth like the 5X+ but does have a larger battery than the 5S+ (8 hours GPS/Music for the 5+)

0 Former Member over 7 years ago

Hi Carl,

I am subscribed to that long thread too.
Today I had a run back, during the day I was 're-adjusting' some thing about the activity.
I think that the Alerts are also consuming, as they switch on the display and the vibrating takes energy too. I switched these off altogether, but left myself the coach. My headphones are connected to both my phone as well as the watch, so the phone will take care of the music. As soon as the watch starts to talk, the music is lowered in volume, quite convenient actually.
The same route back took me another 50 minutes, but only 12% this time, from 60% down to 48%.
I watched for the GPS taking energy after the run, but the first 30 minutes I saw no change. Funny, but after some time the battery took another good chunk and went down to under 40%.
So it looks like the post activity bug is sleeping before it wakes up :)
I have since done two things:
-Menu - Settings - Phone - Off
-Charging

The plan is to keep it through the night with phone switched off and see the result.
In the morning I have a 20-25min bicycle ride which I will see as an activity. Here the phone will be connected. And then I will again try to see what happens during the day if I have the phone 'off' from a point of view of the watch.
I pity very much that I do not seem to find a setting where I can tell the watch to switch syncing on for every 15 or 30 minutes, that looks like a good compromise to me.

Switching to 5+ is not an option. I came from the Nokia Steel HR which is only 36mm, the 5S+ is already big for me, the 5+ would be huge. The 5x+ is, well I do not have a nice word for it, but in short "it is not for me" :).

best regards,
Ruud