Garmin Fenix GPS tracking and battery life

Former Member over 4 years ago

I've had a Garmin Fenix 5 for about 4 years now. The battery now last a day only, and GPS tracking and accuracy is now terrible. It's not tracking a running route accurately anymore and a 5.3km run is measured at 6.77km. Anyone with an idea what I can do?

0 Former Member over 4 years ago

I have the same with the fenix 3 HR and this since the last firmware update

0 Elbo over 4 years ago

Reduced batterylife could be because of

1. normal batterydegeneration. Charging causes wear on your battery. However, a good battery should be able to charge for 500 cycles and still have 80% of max capacity. (from 0% to 100% charge is 1 cycle, and 10 times charge from 70% to 80% is also 1 cycle). Maybe Garmin uses cheap batteries that wear more? Nothing you can do about.

2. Batterycharge isn't properly calibrated. I don't know if this is true for garmin devices, but other devices sometimes have a mismatch with 0% and 100% and either don't charge to the real 100% or complain about low battery way before 0%. You could try to really deplete the battery until your watch goes off. Keep it of for a few hours. Charge until 100% and keep it sometime longer on the charger.

3. Most likely softwarebugs bug you. Garmin isn't very good at softwaredevelopment (or isn't interested in fixing bugs). You could try a factoryreset, but then you will loose all your settings, but if you turn True up on atleast you keep your fitness level.

4. Are you using third party connect iq apps/watchfaces? Better don’t. Ciq is even for garmin standards crap software which causes , among other things, battery drains.