Fēnix 5 Series and Chronos - 21.71 Public Beta

Thanks outlaw24, unfortunally these links redirects to Garmin express. Ans when I connect to Garmin express its automatically selects the newest softwareversion. But never the less: thanks for showing your interest in my problem!

RonHi said:

I have seen a 7% daily average for the first time in a very long time. I am not sure if it will be sustained but it has been noteworthy.

This is an update on my battery consumption experience with this build. I had reported just under a month ago that I was getting much improved usage over many pervious builds. I want to confirm that this has largely continued but I want to say a bit more about the experience based on some bad experiences reported here. 

I got an average of 7-8% daily non-GPS usage in the earliest days of using this watch. Whether due to aging or new builds which came along from time to time, the consumption increased. To be fair, so too did my connected usage with my phone. Some builds were definitely worst than other but on average I started to get closer to  13-20% consumption per day on bad builds. This build has definitely brough things back to 8%-13% per day. I have not been able to determine what causes some day to be so different, even overnight, when there is no deliberate interaction with the phone I can see higher than average consumption on occasions.

Having addressed the improved experience, I do want to address the known cause of a high consumption day that was very informative. I use the Garmin Combo Power App (Garmin Combo Power). It is loaded on a data screen that I use in my runs. I discovered that if I did not remove the field after my run, even though I was not using a run activity, it would drain my battery. Among the configurations that I restore after my runs due to suspected battery problems, beyond the Combo Power, is the backlight time and intensity. I increase backlight time and intensity since many of my runs are in quite low light. A few weeks ago I was shocked that I had lost over 12% over 12 hours. When I checked, I discovered that I had not removed the Combo Power field from my run screen after my previous run.

The lesson from this instance is that we may be using apps, fields or other settings that may be draining our batteries that we may not be aware of.

I never understand how people are convinced that subtle firmware changes are causing battery drain vs maybe GPS sync being lost or MoveIQ being on, or some other feature with the radio or wrist pulse. Or it could just be how the battery sensor is working, it may not be initialized properly and thinking there is way more battery use (or it always was that bad and hid it from you)

However you should be able to use any firmware you want on your own watch of course.

If you search the web for fenix5_2071Beta.zip or fenix5_2072Beta.zip (or the fenix5S_2072Beta.zip if you need the 5S) you will find inside the old file  System_Backdate_v2000  with  GUPDATE.GCD   which you can put into the  \GARMIN folder on your watch to force it to downgrade

Just be careful about random sources for firmware, I doubt anyone is sophisticated enough to purposely make a bad garmin firmware but it could happen. There are also APAC firmwares which will mess up the non-APAC watches, etc. so be careful.

There are also hidden Service and Developer menus on the Fenix but doubt those would help.

rinserepeat Thanks for your warnings.