Real life battery duration in the wild

Former Member over 8 years ago

I purchased the fenix 5X largely in part for the battery life during ultras. I'm coming from a suunto A3P. I've had the fenis for 8 days. I'm still getting used to the garmin system and managing the features on the watch. So far the watch has been great and the gps seems to be very accurate.

I disabled most of the apps, gestures are turned off, and backlight is set to 20%.

29 hours into owning the watch I did 2 runs with gps+glonass. It was about 9 hours of recording time including pause time and my battery level dropped to 39%. I've linked the activities below. Is this a reasonable battery drain for the 9 hours of gps+glonass use on 29 hours of total watch time? it was fully charged when I started. All the activities were at 1 sec recording.

https://www.strava.com/activities/914462258

https://www.strava.com/activities/915741633

I did another run on a full charge with gps only. 4 hours 45 minutes total time and my battery dropped to 75%

https://www.strava.com/activities/921242215

Any suggestions on managing the settings to maximize battery life? I would like to get at least 18 hours of gps activity on a single charge with out having to go to ultra trac. Does anyone have experience using ultratrac recording?

Thanks

0 bglover11 over 8 years ago

I've never seen any actual benefit from using GPS + Glonass on any of my garmin products... so if it seems to save battery I'd limit it to GPS only.

0 Former Member over 8 years ago

Interested in seeing what kind of battery life others are seeing from their 5x's

0 peakrodent over 8 years ago

I did a 50K today in 4:37 and the watch went from 97% to 57% with GPS and GLONASS on. It was on the map all the way round and it was doing a navigation track.

Might try it with glonass off the next time!

0 Former Member over 8 years ago

I did a 50K today in 4:37 and the watch went from 97% to 57% with GPS and GLONASS on. It was on the map all the way round and it was doing a navigation track.

Might try it with glonass off the next time!

Congrats on that race time!

0 Former Member over 8 years ago

I did a 50K today in 4:37 and the watch went from 97% to 57% with GPS and GLONASS on. It was on the map all the way round and it was doing a navigation track.

Might try it with glonass off the next time!

I was in the Lake District last weekend, 5:50hrs of running. I had 1s recording, GLONASS on, Navigation screen on with the route, bluetooth off but everything else left on and was down to 40% from a full charge. So approx 10 hours possible on those settings.

I got 18 hours with the Fenix 3 (non HR) but that was with Smart and GLONASS Off and most other things turned off.

I've found SMART and GLONASS off to be most accurate at the moment and that was the case for the Fenix 3 so going to revert to that for all runs. I always have manual backlight on and set to 5%, so control backlight myself at night.

I've got some 24+ hour running events later in the year and to minimise chargers I'll be turning Wrist HR off, external HR sensors off, activity tracking (steps/floors) off, bluetooth/wifi off. Hopefully that will mimic the Fenix 3 with only the coloured map navigation as the difference. Would be nice to get similar time.

My mate was running with his Fenix 3 and the interestingly we were only 0.02 miles difference with final distance however he had used 20% less battery on a non HR model and bread crumb trail.

0 fulmar2 over 8 years ago

Battery Life...

Hey there. I don't own a Fenix 5X... and probably won't... My experience is with the Epix, and it is that I can never achieve their purported battery life. The closest I came was about 19 hours. I turn everything off to manage that. Moreover, when an activity is running, I'm actually looking at the default watch page - not the data fields (so really, it is just a recorder at that point). I find that GLONASS is very useful in the mountains. In more open terrain, it is not as needed. GLONASS costs you maybe an hour of battery at most. It's not a very big drain. If I have the map showing, or navigation... well, that used to be about 7 hours, but they did a software update nearly 2 years ago, and now I can get 12 hours of navigation out of it.

Now, considering all of this: I believe the spec on the 5X is for a 300mAH battery. I have an epix, which has a 600mAH battery. IF that is correct, they're magically squeezing more out of a smaller power source on the 5X. I may be wrong, though, as different sources quote different numbers for both devices.

0 tickerguy over 8 years ago

It's not magic at all; if the chipset and RAM have undergone some revision(s) they can very easily be more power-efficient. That's extremely common in the SOC world; each evolutionary turn tends to be better than the last, and in an application like this it can make a LARGE difference.

My understanding is that Garmin did some work on the wrist HR hardware as well when they went from the "bump" to the flat sensor, and that the new one consumes much less energy so it can sample more frequently and still use less power.

I've got my first full week on my F5x and got a bit better battery performance out of it than I got out of my Non-HR F3, with an essentially-identical training and race schedule. Both got me through the week, but the F3 on race weeks would usually come up a day short. The F5x this morning, which was a full week since last charge, had 30% power remaining.

There have clearly been improvements made.

0 Volker over 8 years ago

Glonass enabled needs about 20% more battery as gps only. For me gps+glonass is only necessary if you have really heavy conditions- but you won`t get a better signal, a weak signal only stays longer...

For me, glonass is only a marketing thing, because without glonass, garmin wouldn´t be allowed to sell devices in russia...But the marketing team tells us something different...

0 Former Member over 8 years ago

Glonass enabled needs about 20% more battery as gps only. For me gps+glonass is only necessary if you have really heavy conditions- but you won`t get a better signal, a weak signal only stays longer...

For me, glonass is only a marketing thing, because without glonass, garmin wouldn´t be allowed to sell devices in russia...But the marketing team tells us something different...

Good to know, I'll be trying a couple long trail runs this weekend with gps only.

0 Tangmu over 8 years ago

I'm a casual user. 5x: Built-in digital watch face showings seconds, backlight at 40%, only comes on when a button is pushed, every-second recording, GPS only, no Glonass, no auto adjustment of altitude, bluetooth on, wifi off, continuous HR recording.

After 6 days of use, with 1 hour total GPS tracking (5 or 6 different events), lots of fiddling around, I am at exactly 50%. My F3 with sporadic tracking use would be at 15% to 20% after two weeks. That would mean about 65% after 6 days, compared to the 50% so far on my 5x.