Wrong heart rate monitor during training

To add to this saga. After doing more testing with different straps, and the OHR, I think I had two issues going on.

I have always used a pro plus chest strap, even with my older Quatix, not due to OHR issues, but had gotten a new Sole treadmill and I like to see my HR on the treadmill screen and not have to glance at my watch, and linking a strap to it was the easiest way to do that. Later I realized you can broadcat the OHR, but I had gotten used to the strap, and it was still the easiest.

That worked well and I never really saw what the OHR would do during a workout. However, my strap started flaking out not long after getting the Epix Pro G2 and combined with the sensor switching and the OHR issues, it made things unusable.

After thoroughly washing the strap and turning off source switching, I am back in business.

I did use my Quatix originally without the strap and didn't see these issues in my workouts, but by the time I upgraded to the Epix I had already been using the strap religously to display the HR on the treadmill. I know when I try using the Epix OHR (no strap at all), the smoothing algorithm takes 20 seconds to catch up, which won't work for HIIT. Not sure why you would smooth for 20 seconds in any situation to begin with. Is that only for treadmills they do that for, or also runs?

In any event, due to its current quirks, I don't see how the OHR is usable for training. Whether it is inherent in OHR or due to software changes to address other issues. People aren't asking for 100% accuracy, they only want reliability and responsiveness BACK.

At the very least, a statement from Garnin on these issues would have helped. I don't see one coming though.

For people having the weird spikes at a certain point, did you try to wait a bit before starting the activity? Like with the GPS but maybe stay there few minutes with the activity ready to be started.

I'll need to check it more times of course but this happened few days ago

I waited few seconds just to get the GPS and started.

And this was today with a similar activity after i stayed there 2-3 minutes before pressing on the "start"

Similar situation with a small weird part at the beginning but nothing like in the first case

As i said, i'll need to check more activities but just putting it on the table if someone else want to check.

Any news about fixing the software errors of the optical HR sensor from Garmin?

Another steady run, from my side, and no issues with the optical sensor so there's nothing to fix for me

This, again, shows you how the issue is not for the majority of people and making it work well with everyone is difficult but looks like it's a difficult concept for you.

Of course good luck with your next brand and hopefully it works better.

Here's a comparison run with strap and WHR from the other day, which again shows little difference. 

I know there are people for whom WHR doesn't work, perhaps has not worked but that doesn't mean the problem applies to everyone, yet some people just do not want to accept that. Neither do those same people want to accept that Garmin have been consistently improving OHR sensors and software but it will never work for 100% of the people 100% of the time.

Perhaps if the people complaining the loudest reported their problems directly to Garmin Support there might be even more improvement for those who do actually have problems.

And again:

If I am just a single case it's quite cheap to reimburse that single unhappy customer despite where the customer bought the watch.

It's just paying 800 €/$ or whatever the bill says, send in the great watch and garmin can sell it as a used product and doesn't lose a lot of money. Just loses one unhappy customer who is happy again about that great customer service. And might again be thinking about buying a garmin product.

What's happening right now is denying problems with WHR and other software problems. I had contact to garmin support several times, send tgem my data several times and nothing happened.

Might be it's just my anatomy that it's not working for me. But why is garmin denying that and doesn't proof that it's sich a great company as it claims to be and as you claim that it is. 

Fact is, you wait at least 1 hour in the hotline, help is only send your data, thighten the wrist band, etc. nothing useful.

And just spending another 800 € for a new watch is not an option for me. I trusted garmin and they failed to proof that trust. It's 800 € for a broken watch.

Dr Phil said:

Perhaps if the people complaining the loudest reported their problems directly to Garmin Support there might be even more improvement for those who do actually have problems.

Again tendency to put issue on the back of the users. Users did not cause this issue, nor can they fix it. Also, they have been reporting this issue directly to Garmin supoort and to beta forum (which is supposed to be used for bug collection so that they can be fixed before software is released). Still, software bersions got released with same issues. Users have been reporting the issue for 7 months. Now it is Garmin's turn to actually do something about it.

Is the red the strap and the blue the WHR? That would make sense as you can see the smoothing going on. How do you get both data together like that?

You don't know what happened.

It could be that with that software update they fixed the problem for 100 persons and made it bad for 20. It's just a random example.

It's like the issue with battery consumption...some people get weird drainage of battery after every update but it's rarely happening to half of people and when it's happening to really a lot of them we saw updates being put on hold and quick hotfixes being released.

If it was working before maybe just downgrade the version and go back to an older one?

We can go like this forever because there's no concrete answers in these situations except trying things differently....trying to do a soft reset, trying to change a bit the position of the watch, or the wrist(just to understand if something changes).

I hope/believe this is not the case but sometimes you see people complaining about accuracy and then they have the watch over the bone or it's so tight that the watch is leaving marks on the skin 

Use two watches one connected to a strap the other not. Sync both activities to GC. On the GC interweb you can choose to compare up to 4 activities. Click into the small cog to see that option. Not sure which is which without running the comparison again but I’d guess the red is the strap as it responds quicker at the start.