Terrible innaccuracy - return?

Looking for advice as Garmin has been painfully slow to respond to emails, and I only have a short time remaining on my return period.

My new Fenix 5 is showing extremely high calories burned by "Daily Steps". For example, I'm 5-11', 195lbs with a desk job.

Today - 5086 steps, 883 calories
Yesterday - 8266 steps, 1455 calories
Wednesday - 10066 steps, 781 calories
Tuesday - 8392 steps, 1222 calories

And, a lot of those steps are from 30 or so minutes on the treadmill every day for which the calories are broken out separately.

I had the exact same issue with my Fenix 3HR. I was able to improve this slightly by switching my heart rate zones to %HRR but this still seems very high.

Also I'm not sure if this is related, but the All Day Stress claims I am pretty much always under stress, even when sleeping.

Should I return it for another Fenix 5 or is this a known issue with the product?

0 Former Member over 7 years ago

Likely, getting a FootPod would solve the problem.

0 mdp84 over 7 years ago

Likely, getting a FootPod would solve the problem.

Interesting. I'm guessing you mean because it's more accurate, which makes me wonder if I need to do some sort of calibration ? For example my Apple Watch wanted you to do a 20 minute walk with the GPS going.

I'm not totally closed off to the idea but I'm hesitant to spend another $50 to get some reasonable accuracy after spending this much on the watch itself. So far it's been the most expensive fitness device I've had and the most inaccurate, even though I do really like all the other features.

0 mcalista over 7 years ago

A few things to check:

* that your body weight metrics and units are correct (eg. that you haven't accidentally entered 195 kilograms).
* what are your maximum and resting heart rates, and how did you measure these? And what heart rate are you normally when walking or running on the treadmill?

I don't think lack of a footpod is the problem here.

0 mdp84 over 7 years ago

I had put in a resting heart rate of 70bpm, as my fitbits and and apple watches usually show 68-70. Garmin says 75 after wearing it a week so I'll raise it to that in the HRR settings and see if it makes any difference. It filled in a max heart rate of 181 on its own, which I assume it calculated based on an age formula. Walking on the treadmill at an average 20min / mile it recorded my average heart rate as 115bpm.

I hope the answer lies in a bad data field some where. I've thought it over and I think I'll return it before buying a footpod.

I took off the watch to sleep, but have 59 calories burned for my 378 steps.

ciq.forums.garmin.com/.../1289597.png

0 mdp84 over 7 years ago

Something I just found: When I go into Settings / User Profile / Heart Rate on the watch it says for Resting Heart Rate "--". I changed it to Use Average which was 75.

0 mdp84 over 7 years ago

Thanks to all that attempted to help with my issue, but I just got back from returning the watch. I thought I was making some progress with the Daily Step calories, but then a new problem appeared. After claiming all week I was around 1100ft altitude (which is about right) it said this afternoon I was at 65000ft. I went to the park for a walk and calibrated it before doing the walk, and it claimed during my 25 minute walk I went through a 10,000ft elevation change. Calibrated yet again before the 5 minute drive home and by the time I got home I was 500ft below sea level. Read about the warm water and soap fix, but that didn't seem to help either. Based on other posts barometer / altimeter issues are not that uncommon so I returned instead of exchanging.