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Realistic battery life, fenix 5?

Former Member over 8 years ago

Hello all,

So last week I bought a fenix 5. Store had it in open box and on the shelf but it was off, I was worried about it having been on for months on the shelf but they told me it had never been powered on, they only had the 5X on display powered up. Bought it, no discount got home and charged it. The battery was completely discharged.

One of my main reasons for buying the fenix 5 vs a 3 or another less expensive option was battery life - as I am starting to run ultra marathons.

Last Saturday ran my first. I started with 95% charge. GPS only mode (no Glonnass). I played occasionally with the watch during the race, and often moved it into view to see my HR (with backlight at 50%). Halfway into the race, 7 hours in, I notice it is at 40% battery. I changed it to Ultratrac in the activity settings menu, and start avoiding using the backlight or play with it(still glancing at it often to see HR).

My race time was 14 hours 30 minutes. When I made it across the finish line, literally 1 minute after, I glance at the watch to stop the activity and it powered down.

I know actual, realistic device times are often lower than what the manufacturer advertises. Still, advertised GPS mode at 20 hours and Ultratrac 60 hours, seems I should have gotten to the end of this race with a good battery reserve. I am planning longer races later in the season so... this watch might not cut it, apparently. My iphone 7 plus in airplane mode, but doing GPS tracking, went through all of this with 30% power left and me taking some pictures and listening to podcasts on the way.

So question to the group - is this the normal battery life I can expect from this device while tracking activities? Or did I get a dud or a battery affected by it being a showroom device?

Unsure if I am just being paranoid and need to enjoy the device and go Ultratrac from the start, turn off the backlight (not needed to be honest).

Thanks all,

Juan

Top Replies

Garmin-Heath over 6 years ago +1 verified

If you are experiencing rapid battery drain, where your watch is only lasting a few days, first verify on latest software version. If you are using any third-party Connect IQ watch faces, try changing…

All Replies

0 AnatoliAngelov over 6 years ago

Hi,

I've recently bought an F5 and seem to have one that suffers from the battery drain issue, i've been waiting for the stable fw release (I have no laptop) so got excited upon reading the Garmin statement that it's been rolled out to 100% of users but my watch is still on fw12.0. Auto-update is on and I've synced the watch to GCM a few times but no update, is there something else I should be doing?

Thanks
Dan

Use Garmin Express on PC.

0 pistapoci over 6 years ago

After a couple of days i must say that 12.21 fixed my battery issues. In the next days I'll update to 12.30, but I'm not expecting to see further improvements

0 sirgab01 over 6 years ago

Hi all.
I am currently on 12.30 v, after using beta 12.21...
After some days of normal usage (0.2%-0.3%-0.4% per hour) the watch starded using 0.5% - 0.9% per hour again. I will try a hard reset (again) but.........
I am realy confused. I am thinking to return it because this is not normal.

But what really puzzles me, is, what if they send me a watch, with the same problem, or even worse.....

I would really appreciate your opinion.

0 BLAU over 6 years ago

Hi all, today I received the refurbished one, 53* with 8.0 so ... think never will update it lol.

After see that the 12.30 seems to back to the anormal battery drain, think will update to 12.21, that almost every one got the same good feedback and seems to fix the problem, and wait there for a better performance.

0 cnorm over 6 years ago

I had the high battery issue from purchase at the end of December until updating to 12.21 on the evening of 1/17. I had charged it the previous night and in the 11 hours prior to installing the beta update my watch drained 13%. Since installing that it has now been nearly an entire 8 days and I'm sitting at 31.5% now for a drain of ~55% over the period. This is with HR, smart watch, and 30-40 minutes of GPS all but one of the days. I will note that I had not intended to update to 12.30 but evidently had auto updates enabled, so I woke up to seeing that it updated to 12.30 over night 1/23 into 1/24. I have not noticed a return to the high drain issue that I had seen on version 12.00.

0 pistapoci over 6 years ago

Correction: the first 20-30% of the full charge is still draining at 1-2%/h, then it seems to slow down to 0.3-0.6%/h. I'm confused..

0 Former Member over 6 years ago

I'm on 12.30 now and there is no improvement, still 1.35%/h drain or more... Maybe one more time installing 12.21, after that I will go on 12.00, there i had atleast 4-5 days.. I'm very dissapointed in this watch, don't know what to do anymore ????

0 Former Member over 6 years ago

I have been following this thread, and decided to check the battery consumption on my F5. I bought it i March 2017, so it is shortly 2 years. I have been using it almost 24/7 logging on average 11 hours of training every week. I have BT on, 5% light on button switch, notifications, moveIQ and sleep tracking. Some 40-70% of the logged hours are with GPS (only). I use only the standard watch faces and no IQ apps or data fields.

Battery consumption seems unchanged, but I have noticed that the percentage reported is not linear. For example, on average my watch consumes between 0,17 to 0,2 % per hour with two exceptions. Between 38 and 28% remaining, the hourly consumption goes above 0,5 up towards 0,7% per hour.

But, during a week the average battery consumption matches or is even better than the specifications. The last eight days the watch went from 100% to 18% including 8,5 hours of GPS (bike, running, XC skiing), plus several hours in the gym (reps count consumes 1% per hour) with weights and aeobic training machines.

So far so good, in other words. But, it is a concern that Garmin seems to struggle to manage battery issues for all their 5 models. I have decided to wait to update from 12.0 to 12.3, since I am obviously better off than several of you in the thread, and I am hesitant on upgrading to a 5+ at this time.

With hopes to see improvements for all devices.

0 Richard-Hagen over 6 years ago

Hi all! The latest upgrade seemed to fix my watch! I have 29% left, and planning a 2.5 hour long run today, should put my watch to about 10% left and last for a few more days :D
(I'll let you know how it goes ;) )

BUT I also noticed that I got a upgraded GPS firmware with the Beta, so I'm running:

GPS 2.30
Wifi 2.40
CIQ 301
BLE/ANT/SNS 6.25
WHR 20.03.31
Firmware 12.30 (I got a upgrade trough my phone a few days ago, so I restarted the watch then)

Totally this week, I have had 5 runs, with a total of 6.5 hours of GPS tracking, rest is everything on except MoveIQ...
(Also, since I have a Office job, it seems to use way less battery while I'm sitting at work than in the afternoon while I move around abit, seems maybe the step tracking might consume some battery to...)

[EDIT], I noticed when upgrading regularly to 12.0 (trought 10 and 11), I did NOT get the GPS upgrade, it was stil stuck on 4.4.0(!), I have a feeling there is a bug here somewhere ;)

[EDIT #2]
After 2 hours of GPS tracking I'm down to 18% battery :D

0 jamesrussell01 over 6 years ago

Richard-Hagen,
I noticed your BLE/ANT/SNS is 6.25......
Did that update as well? I ask because all my numbers match your except that one. My BLE/ANT/SNS is 6.20

Can anyone else confirm their #'s