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 cjcates007_ over 8 years ago

I ran 3:45 today. No GLONASS, no BT, no Activity Tracking, I was in Smart Recoding mode. No vibration alert. Got 4.5% drain per hour putting it at around a 22 hour battery life. Awesome!!

0 Former Member over 8 years ago

I ran 3:45 today. No GLONASS, no BT, no Activity Tracking, I was in Smart Recoding mode. No vibration alert. Got 4.5% drain per hour putting it at around a 22 hour battery life. Awesome!!

Was the map of your run pretty accurate in smart mode ?

0 cjcates007_ over 8 years ago

It seemed fine to me. 1 sec and Smart record the same distances, just less points are recorded to make files smaller and use less processing power.

Check out my trail running activity

https://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/1656746947

Was the map of your run pretty accurate in smart mode ?

0 bglover11 over 8 years ago

Ran 2.5 hours today - every second GPS only, no useless glonass, activity tracking on, BT off, paired with HRM run strap, auto lap every mile, white background with backlight only with button presses - used 9%.

0 Former Member over 8 years ago

Never used Glonass

FWIW I've never used glonass on my F3 and I have never had any real issues with accuracy. I live in the northern hemisphere and I do ultra running op to 12hrs. Only on multi day events have I had the need to recharge the watch.

Br,
Tue

0 Volker over 8 years ago

Ran 2.5 hours today - every second GPS only, no useless glonass, activity tracking on, BT off, paired with HRM run strap, auto lap every mile, white background with backlight only with button presses - used 9%.

Map page?

0 bglover11 over 8 years ago

Map page?

Map page is enabled, I can view the moving map on about page 4 of my activity during the run if that's what you mean. I don't actively look at it often though as Im in familiar territory

0 Former Member over 8 years ago

I did another trail run just over 3 hours. 2 data screens and the map page. I had it on the first data screen most of the time and looked at the map screen a few times just to see if the map was accurate. It really was, it showed a lot of side trails I had never noticed before. I had gps only and Bluetooth turned off. Screen at 20%. Used about 15% battery life for the 3 hours.

https://www.strava.com/activities/929647975

Sunday I'm planning a 30 mile trail run. That should really give me a better idea if I'll be able to pull off a 100k on one sec gps mode. If not I'll start tinkering with smart mode.

Hope people keep chiming in on his topic.

0 newtonfb over 8 years ago

Has anyone noticed, sometime in the last week on the Garmin official spec sheet for the 5X, the Ultra-trac battery is now stated as "35 hours" What the hell?

0 gaijin over 8 years ago

Ultratrac spec went from 50 hours to 35 hours overnight ... very odd, I agree.