Fenix 5+ power drain

Hello,

I've got a battery drain issue with my fenix 5+. They were not in use for the last 2 months. After powering up, updating (to SW 11.00) and charging the battery life became completely disastrous. In smartwatch mode it consumed aroud 0.4..0.5% per hour. But after first outdoor activity with GPS it started to burn the power like demon. Average consumption ranged from 1.5% to 2% per hour and never less. I tried rebooting and soft reset; this helped until the first GPS activity. After that the power drain returned to the extra level. All external sensors (including wrist HR) were turned off. Moreover, I've tried the beta SW (11.73) - nothing new: after resetting everything looks fine till the first GPS connect.

I love my watches, but the power drain is far off the specification and dissapointes me. I see that without any sport activity battery works well and could hold the charge up to 8..9 days. But it doesn't fit me.
Do you have any idea how to troubleshoot this?

PS: I tried to fully discharge and recharge the battery to recalibrate the circuits.

Thank you in advance.

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0 kvasimodoo over 4 years ago

Same with mi Fenix 5X plus ! About 0.3%-0.5% battery per hour , but after the activity with GPS, the consumption started to be about 1.3%-1.6% battery per hour. Same for both sw 11 and sw 11.73beta. It always helped to restart, but only to the next activity with GPS. Now I downgraded to sw 9.10, so hopefully it will be good. I will test and see

0 Bit over 4 years ago

Did you switch the watch off with some charge still remaining, or did you store it while it was switched on? If you stored it switched off with about 40% charge nothing much should happen to it, and then nothing much can be done except calling Garmin.

It is likely that the watch has battery protection to shut the device off when the battery is near empty (to avoid over-discharging which damages it), but it doesn't do the battery any good to be near empty for a long time. Loads of information here: https://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_lithium_based_batteries

That said, I had left a Fenix (old one, original model) in a drawer for a year, and after charging it drained real quick. But after about 20 charge/discharge cycles (I let it run down to 40% and charged it to 80% each time) it had lost some capacity, but now it can be used like normal.

The 5 Plus is a much newer model so your mileage may vary, but before replacing the battery, you can try to charge it to about 80%, use it a while, let it drain to 40% and repeat that many times. It might just get your watch usable again.

0 kvasimodoo over 4 years ago in reply to Bit

I wear Fénix 5x plus all the time, it just showed up after the update from sw 10 to sw 11 and sw 11.73, now that I'm back at 9.10 the battery is still O.K. Today from 8:00 to 16:00 is a drop in battery so far from 100% to 98%. Again, satisfaction !!! And yesterday after running 30. min gps + Galileo even with music playing in the headphones was - 6%. After the activity, the battery consumption went below 1% again. I don't know why it happened to me, but now I'd rather stay with sw 9.10. I didn't have this problem with the previous sw 10 either, but so far I'm most satisfied with sw 9.10

0 tinkster over 4 years ago

Which app/widget is this in your image?

0 kvasimodoo over 4 years ago in reply to tinkster

If I'm not mistaken, there is (Battery Gauge) from Connect IQ

0 kvasimodoo over 4 years ago in reply to kvasimodoo

So after a total of 2 activities, my high consumption finally manifested itself in SW 9.10. So I gave up, and did a restart and update back to sw 10.00 restart again and via Garmin Express update to the last sw 11.00 and restart again. Then upload via Garmin Connect backups, and restart again. And to my surprise the last 3 days the watch is absolutely fine. Yesterday activity 6 km and 1h after running battery check and consumption 0.3% per h. Today activity running 21 km and 2h after running battery check and consumption 0.2% per h. Perhaps it will stay that way, I have no idea what the problem was before.

0 tinkster over 4 years ago in reply to kvasimodoo

Thank you - that appears to be it indeed.

0 Tisztul_A_Visztula over 4 years ago in reply to kvasimodoo

My findings of an earlier battery test with my F5+:

1. All the watchfaces with seconds always on have higher daily battery consumption than the built-in digital watchface with seconds always on. With built-in watchface you can go down to the range of 4-6%/day, with my favourite watchface WF4CoolSolid or WF4LOOC it is at least 8%/day, sometimes 10-11%.

2. You cannot rely on the battery number, the discharge rate is almost higher in the range of 70-100% than in 40-70%.

3. WIFI auto upload has no visible effect on battery consumption.

4. Storm alert can increase battery consumption, around 0.5-1%/d.

5. The highest effect on non-GPS consumption is running GC mobile app (I use the IOS app), apart from the evident activity and sleep tracking, optical heart monito, backlight, etc.

Therefore I run GC app just only once after I restart my watch. It is eeded to get notifications on my watch in notifications widget. I have chosen so kind of watchfaces which do not need a continuous run of GC in order to show notifications on the watchface itself.

Watchout: there are some pretty nice watchfaces, like my former favourite, Nofrills, which do need GC app to run always in order to be able to show the number of unread notifications.

To speak in numbers: running GC app constantly can increase daily battery consumption by 2-4% depending on when GC ‘thinks’ it is the time to sync too often with the watch.

6. I tried other settings like altitude calibration ‘not during activity’, but I could not conclude without doubts whether these other settings have a measurable effect on battery drain or not.

By the way these days the daily drain of my watch jumped up from 8-9% to 11-12%, and I have no idea why. I am on 11.00 for quite a long while, and have made no changes in the settings menu recently. And I always avoid backlight and this sort of typical battery consumers.

Hope that my test results will help people around. Take care.

0 Tisztul_A_Visztula over 4 years ago in reply to Tisztul_A_Visztula

Btw never use any battery meter to test your battery consumption, because my finding was that battery gauge widgets increase the battery consumption themselves to a visible extent.

0 kvasimodoo over 4 years ago in reply to Tisztul_A_Visztula

So I guess I figured it out! It looks like a problem in the ANT / BLE / BT 6.03 driver, which I downloaded from beta 11.73. When I run with activity, after running the battery returns to my consumption of about 0.4% per hour, but when I turn on the headphones via Bluetooth while running, it probably remains active after disconnecting the controller, and consumes the battery even after disconnecting the headphones. I tried to install an older ANT / BLE / BT driver, but unfortunately it doesn't work anymore. Otherwise, the battery consumption is about 0.3-0.4% per hour, but after connecting and then disconnecting the headphones, the consumption remains over 1% per hour. Not sure if you could load an older ANT / BLE / BT driver? The only option is to restart the watch after disconnecting the headphones!