Wrong heart rate monitor during training

Pity is I was debating between updating my Quatix to the Epix Pro or getting the Ultra. Obviously, with the Ultra you get the best smartwatch, but right now I am big on fitness and Garmin/Connect was simply best at that, plust the battery life. I lost 80 lbs over 6 months and my Garmin was critical to that. It allowed me to precisely up my exercise intensity as I lost weight and became more conditioned, and gave me a realistic and consistent total calories burned. I was able to lose the weight and get into shape consitently by the numbers.At least now I have a work around with the strap, but my other metrics are a mess now, from switching off the wrist HR and forgetting to switch it back on. The Ultra is the closest so far, with 3 days of battery, but I am sure that is not really 3 days. You would probably charge it in a 2 hour window each day, when you are not active.

I’ve got the epix since it was released and had no issues until a few updates back. To me the optical HR was so good that I stopped using the HRM Pro band. 

can’t really believe garmin is not issuing at least an ETA for such a big problem.. either proves not everyone is having the problem, or most people don’t actually care to check if the data there are receiving is accurate.

Thanks for confirming that it did use to work. I have only had mine for a few months, updated from Quatix, and it has been such a mess recently, I couldn't remember if it did ever actually work right. I thought it did. Maybe there is hope that they sort this out. Flashlight is cool, but not $800 cool.

I still don't understand that Garmin is not communicating about those problems so that people know that they care about those problems and their customers and work on solutions with giving a rough date about when a solution will be made available.

This kind of attitude from garmin towards their premium watch customers is not comprehensible to me and finally I hope that they will lose a lot of customers because of it. In my opinion that's a lack of integrity from garmin, not fair...

I raised this with garmin support quite some time ago, and since then 2 updates have come out, neither of which have resolved this major issue. The screenshot is from todays run, where my heart rate didn’t go above 122 for over 6 minutes and then jumped to the mid 160 range (where it should have been after about 45 seconds!!!). This is becoming increasingly frustrating, especially as I spend the first part of my run getting annoyed at the heart rate being incorrect when I should be focusing on the run itself! Have the garmin engineers actually put on a watch and tried running for 5 minutes? If they did, they might actually experience the problem that so many people are having! I’m getting tired of receiving emails from support suggesting that I loosen or tighten the band, or try warming up for 5 minutes before starting the activity. I do not expect this from such an expensive watch. I also don’t see why I should have to purchase a chest monitor just to get an accurate reading, when this was why I chose a more expensive watch in the first place! Garmin-Laurie is there any update on this please? 

8374040 said:

also don’t see why I should have to purchase a chest monitor just to get an accurate reading, when this was why I chose a more expensive watch in the first place

Caveat emptor! The limitations of wrist heart rate is nothing to do with the price of the watch and have been well publicized by all manufactures including Garmin.

www.garmin.com/.../

I appreciate it’s not going to be 100% accurate, however there is clearly a fault as the heart rate is relatively accurate when it is working as it should be. I have a chest strap, and it isn’t too far off the watch WHEN it is working as it should, and not 40 beats below. Thank you for your extremely helpful comment though! Really appreciated… 

And based on your point, the watch should still be incorrect relative to the actual heart rate, which would still give a consistent (accurate or not) reading! It may be a few beats off, but this should be constant with your heart rate, not 40 beats below! So my statement remains, there is an issue with the heart rate reading on this watch. 

But I have been using Garmin (Quatix before I upgraded to Epix) for a couple years and it was fine. And the Epix appeared to be fine when I first got it. It was only recently that it exhibited this strange behavior of being way out of sync with my current HR, which makes it hard to train when you are used to training in particular zones or doing HIIT. I do have the Pro Plus strap and have been using it as a workaround, but I have to disable the wrist HR to get the accuracy and responsiveness I was used to. If I forget to turn the wrist HR back on, then all my other metrics are toast. This is crazy that Garmin thinks those who use their watches for fitness won't mind that the HR data is this unreliable now. What is a fitness watch with unreliable HR data? An expensive step counter? Fitness tracking was their strong point. When I do HIIT, I have finished the interval and according to my watch I have barely begun. They did something with the smoothing alforithm and it is really bad for higher intensity tracking. Useless actually. I am hoping they are still working on a fix, but it does seem like they are done with this issue.