Battery Drain After Recorded Activity

Seems as if my 5X+ battery continues to drain at a higher pace after recording an activity. During normal usage the battery drains at around .2-.5% per hour. After recording an activity it's generally much higher, as if its still looking for sensors.

I recorded 2.5 hours of non-GPS activity yesterday while listening to music from the 5X+. I went to record my battery tracking stats this am and found that the 5X+ had drained 1.5% over the last hour (while sleeping). I usually power the 5X+ off, then on and the battery drain usually resumes to .2-.5%.

Anyone else experience this?

Firmware:
SW 5.10
GPS 2.30
WiFi 2.50
CIQ 3.0.3
BMX 0.2.4
WHR 20.03.32
ANT/BLE/BT 3.00
Sensor 2.20

0 Crispin_Ellisdon over 6 years ago

There are quite a lot of similar experiences in this thread https://forums.garmin.com/forum/on-t...g-battery-life and there are also posts from Garmin_Heath about how you can provide data to help ID the real cause and therefore help develop a solution (don’t expect anything overnight though, this is obviously proving a tough nut to crack).

0 lakaw over 6 years ago

I started digging through that thread. Since my issues are after a recorded activity, I'm going to try turning off wifi auto upload to start (as suggested by NeilJonesOnline)

0 ImDisaster over 6 years ago

The most reliable fix is just rebooting your watch after an activity that involves the GPS.

0 Former Member over 6 years ago

Are you using the Battery Gauge widget from IQ Store? If so, did you open the widget right after you finished the activity?
Because you have to consider this quote from the widget description:

Widget showing battery history for a selected period. Currently it is a bit limited, since it isn't possible to have a process running in the background storing the battery state continuosly. The way the widget currently works is that every time the widget is started, the battery charge value is read and saved. The value is compared to the previous one, and the graph is updated. Each bar in the graph represents an hour (in week view), so if the widget for instance is started at 12 o'clock and later at 4 o'clock, the values at 12 and 4 are real values. The values at 1, 2 and 3 o'clock are calculated based on the difference between 12 and 4. If one starts the widget at regular intervals, the graph should give a quite good representation of the battery state.

Might be that there are these battery drains after activity. But I suspect many people are interpreting the values from this widget wrong.

0 MiGR73cz over 6 years ago

Hi, I have the same issue. My 5x plus consumes 1% per hour. It means approximately 4 days without any activity. Is it normal? I am bit disappointed since my F3HR has been a way better.

BTW: I am using standard Garmin watch-face and PulseOx tracking OFF.

0 lakaw over 6 years ago

Are you using the Battery Gauge widget from IQ Store? If so, did you open the widget right after you finished the activity?
Because you have to consider this quote from the widget description:

Might be that there are these battery drains after activity. But I suspect many people are interpreting the values from this widget wrong.

I am, and did not realize it calculated in that manner. However, I am also tracking in a spreadsheet, so I can see when the battery drain is there after recorded activities. I usually record the battery level in the morning to see what kind of over night battery drain is occurring.

0 MiGR73cz over 6 years ago

I think I've tried everything. Turned lot of features OFF, including OHR, BT, Wifi, etc. Nothing helped. The watch consumes about 1.5 percent per hour. Pretty bad. The bigger battery was major driver for me to buy 5X. Unfortunately I don't believe it can last 20 days in watch mode.

0 lakaw over 6 years ago

That is pretty high. Over 8 full charges since August I've averaged .48% drop per hour. That includes on average 9 hrs of recorded activity (both GPS and non-GPS, plus music) per week.

That being said, I still see a higher drop per hour after a recorded activity.

0 Former Member over 6 years ago

That is pretty high. Over 7 full charges since August I've averaged .48% drop per hour. That includes on average 9 hrs of recorded activity (both GPS and non-GPS, plus music) per week.

That being said, I still see a higher drop per hour after a recorded activity.

According to this site, Battery drain is:
7.7%/h for GPS+Music
0.21%/h for Smartwatch+HR

Your 0.48%/h means 208h of battery life. Without knowing how much of those 9h were with GPS
we calculate: 9h*7.7%/h + (208-9)*0.21%/h = 111% of rated Battery Capacity.
Now of course not all of those 9h were with GPS which means that Capacity would come down a bit, but all in all I think that fits quite well the rated Battery drain.
I would not worry too much about any "Post Activity Battery Drain" if Battery life holds up to what it is expected to.