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Fenix 5 Plus determination of floors climbed

Today I had something strange, I had to climb a tower with in total about 20 meters height difference.
I climbed this tower (spiral staircase) two times and the alitmeter seems to be following it quite good.
When I look at the number of floors climbed it displays 4 whilst my iPhone and Android phone both displayed 12 floors.
For some reason the detection of the number of floors climbed seems to be a bit off, the only thing I can imaging is that the spiral staircase was split into two sections so it is 4 flights of stairs in total but the number of floors is not correct. I don't know what altitude difference Apple uses to determine a floor.
  • In addition to altitude change, the F5 needs to detect that you are walking to detect stairs. If you climbed the tower holding the handrail, or had otherwise engaged your watch-wearing arm into anything else than natural walking swing, then that might have skewed the results.
  • A Garmin 'floor' is 10' (3m)
  • Former Member
    0 Former Member
    Forget the stairs climbed feature in the Garmin watch... i does not work realiable at all!
    It's more of an overpayed random number generator...
    Even worse... it's not repeatable and gives different results each time you repeat.
    And yes, i use to walk stairs up and down and not crawl or fly... hello Garmin!
  • I walk up to the 21st floor at work every day, and back, and it counts pretty good, the same number always. Only stairs down is rubbish. I mean 21 up and 15 or 17, sometimes 18 down is no good. Up is perfect though. And yes, I swing my arms during the process.
  • Forerunner you seem to be unlucky - most of the time the floor count matches for my office stairs although it has the occasional wobbly. It does always seem to record a couple less down than up though - like yesterday where I had 59 up and 57 down.