v9.36 Official Software Fast Battery Drain

Battery problems have been introduced with version 9.14 and have been reported throughout the whole beta cycle. Communication, however, isn't Garmin's strong suit and it has shown in the way bug reports were handled (although it got better as time went on). I don't think the problem affects most watches, but it looks like a bigger issue. Combined with the sluggishness of the glance loop when certain Garmin widgets are present, this doesn't feel like a polished release. I don't blame the dev team, though. I think they're doing what they can with the resources they have.

Interestingly, the latest firmware for 955 seems,  from looking at the forum, to have a similar problem. As it is also being widely reported on the Fenix 7 groups, I wonder if the common factor could indeed be the updated GCM or the bluetooth connection to it? The fact that turning off the phone connection reportedly solves the problem for those that have tried it, might suggest it was. 

Yes, disabling BT has always helped to slow down battery drain. It doesn't completely solve the problem, though. Well, it's not my job to figure out what's wrong with the firmware and since I don't experience massive drain (just twice as much as before), I can live with it for now.

This is crazy battery drain after this update meaning the battery not lasting more than 24 hours and so pretty pointless wearing the watch as never enough charge to do any real activities.

Turning off phone connection doesn't solve it for me.

It seems there are two types of battery drain being reported on the forums: a rapid drain from full in a day or two and a merely accelerated drain which, at least according to the battery indicator, appears to reduce battery life by about half. 

I've done all the steps mentioned by Chris from Garmin. I'm not using (or ever have used) Strava segments or 3rd party watch faces.

I'm not experiencing the massive drain, but still 50% more compared to v8.37 software which I had previously.

With v8.37 the drop (with gesture, no GPS) was about 6% per 24h period, now it is about 9%.

I have made a simple test:

1) Disconnected all external devices (headphones & mobile phone).
2) Fully charged my EPIX2 to 100%
3) unplugged power supply
4) WiFI is switched off

So the watch is 'isolated'. No active connections to any other device, neither Wifi nor BT.

After 4 hours with NO connected phone or headphone the battery meter is now showing 96% remaining.
So this is roughly 1% drain per hour, which results in roughly 100 hours (a bit more than 4 days) of stamina.
This is far away from the 10 days (at least) when running on v8.37 while my phone was connected constantly.
Also my iPhone was running same iOS version while my EPIX2 was running on v8.37 and v9.33.
So to me it really looks like the issue is within the watch.
Only change here is the firmware version.
And no, I have not yet left the watch running out of battery to see if this is just a display issue or if the battery is really draining that fast now.
No matter what, I really believe the issue is located in the new firmware and it is up to Garmin to find and eliminate the bug/issue.
Hope Garmin is already tackling this, as they consider this watch as PREMIUM product and imho they should get the issue fixed rather sooner than later.
As the stamina is THE feature why I have choosen this watch over all the other brands I am a bit dissapointed now.

Maybe Garmin could re-relase the good old v8.37 as 'new' version v9.34 so that one could 'upgrade' to it and get back the stamina while they are tackling the issue(s) in v9.33 ????

In my case instead of 12 days I have 8. So it looks similar. 50% more % per 24h.

That's in line what I see.

Please add me to your tracking list. This is terrible! Never upgrading again.