Garmin Instinct: Floors Climbed and Elevation Potential Issue?

Garmin counts floors by the degree of the slope (at least 6% grade) travelled and the time it took to cover that distance.  It also uses the accelerometer and arm movement.  So, even though your partner with the F5 was walking with you, if your arm swinging was different, you'd see a difference in floors counted.  What were the barometer readings on both watches when you and your wife did the Orienteering event?  If one were further off than the other, that watch would have a bigger change in pressure readings when acclimating to the correct pressure during the event making the watch "think" the pressure change was due to more elevation gained.

Frankly told the elevation measuring is not very reliable, and depends on many factors. Plain measuring of the elevation by the barometric sensor alone will never work reliably enough, because it is influenced by the atmospheric pressure and its changes, the wind, the sensitivity and hysteresis of the pressure sensor, and the function can be also seriously hindered by sweat and dirt cumulating in the pressure sensor orifice, which is especialy at Instinct quite common. You also need to calibrate the altimeter regularly, or use the auto-calibration function. There are several modes of calibration - entering the elevation manually, by GPS, or DEM (Digital Elevation Model - I believe that this one is still only on Instinct with the beta version of the firmware). The DEM method should be the most accurate in most locations, but it still does not work quite right anyway. The way it works and the frequency of calibration during an activity was not revealed, but it does not seem to work right even if you have the option "auto-calibration during activity" turned on - it still often records quite wrong data. So far, I am always turning on the option Elevation Correction on the detailed page of the activity. It then recalculates all the track using geographic data, and shows the true elevation profile (assuming the GPS tracking was all right), and much more realistic values of the Elevation Gain.

As for counting the floors climbed - after doing frequent floors climbing activities of around 100 stories, I finally mananged to get the reported numbers to some 95% of the reality. At the beginning, without the experience, Instinct recorded only about 30% of them. I published some of the tips in this thread.

Thanks for the feedback, interesting as given your info both watches were wrong over 66% of the time.   I have no idea how its calculated but being but missing 20 of 30 floors is odd.   Especially when you consider it found even more store descents.....

In regards to your thoughts on the orienteering I am not sure I understand (once again I have no idea how its calculated) but even if the base barometric pressure was different it should still have been the delta from the base so both numbers should be similar even if they weren't set correctly.   I will make sure we reset our barometers and try again.

Thanks 

Interesting, I will check the PSO and check my calibration more often.

Thanks for the pointers on the Floors climber.   For some reason this is a number I enjoy tracking and have been pretty frustrated with it being off by 66%.

kaisersa1 said:

For some reason this is a number I enjoy tracking and have been pretty frustrated with it being off by 66%.

Most common mistakes when climbing floors are taking the steps by two (or more), and holding on the railing, or raising the hand to look at the watch while climbing. There are more tips in the mentioned thread, but already those three things may improve the accuracy of reporting by tens of percent.

Thanks, I read through your link, unfortunetly most of the time while climbing stairs they are drills and I am carrying things, or holding the railing as my load is 100lbs plus for balance.   Guess its just the way it is.

kaisersa1 said:

Guess its just the way it is.

If you do not use both hands for holdig the railing, keep the watch on the hand that is free. You can also put the watch on your ankle instead - I do it for certain type of exercises, when the hand is not well usable.

Thanks