Battery life when hiking

I know there are a lot of discussions around battery life on a 5 Plus. I've had mine for about 8 months now, and while I'm mostly happy with battery life day-to-day, I have a question around settings to conserve battery life.

I went on a 10 hour hike yesterday. I started the Hiking activity and only paused it twice - accidentally. When I started the watch was at 92%. When I stopped the hike 10 hours later the watch was at 36%. I have wrist-based heart rate on. I have phone notifications off (My phone was in airplane mode anyway). Backlight on gestures is turned off.

What other settings can I look at to reduce battery usage? I am planning on some upcoming multi-day 6-10 hour hikes without the ability to re-charge. At this rate my watch won't last more than a day and half.

Thanks for any advice!

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0 WD over 5 years ago in reply to 9895957

I'm not sure how the 5 Plus battery compares to the 5X Plus, but I think your watch is probably fine, and you're not going to get much more with GPS on. And I'm not sure why some are telling you to disable UltraTrack. I just got off 700 miles on the AT. I could get about 2 14hr days out of my 5X plus, and walk into a shelter on 3-5%. I used UltraTrack the entire time, and it was plenty accurate enough. I used all the sensors, and did manual O2 checks. I occasionally paired it to my Garmin Mini as well.

You're going to need a battery regardless. I carried two Anker PowerCore II10000 for all my gadgets. They support PowerIQ2 or above. So if your Fenix 5 plus is your only worry, it's probably enough for 10 charges or so. But remember, most batteries are only 60-70% efficient. So if its 6700, you are only going to get about 4K or so worth of juice.

0 Dr Phil over 5 years ago in reply to WD

I've always wandered how Ultratrac faired in the environment for which it was intended as most tests seem to be just that, a test. Thanks for sharing this.

0 Former Member over 5 years ago

Don't leave the map data-screen running as the constant re-draws will massively impact battery life.

I'd recommend using Ultra-Trac mode when hiking (you're not moving fast enough to need the regular GPS polling interval anyway), enable heading bug (it'll point to the direction you should be heading in) and displaying a data screen which gives you metrics related to distance travelled, distance remaining, elevation remaining and ETA.