Active Calories from Edge 1040 not syncing?

martinherbrich said:

Do I also need to start the activity (bike ride) on my 965 as well as connecting it with my power meter and HR strap or just wear it (passively) during the ride?

I reviewed the documentation of the features Unified Training Status (UTS), Physio TrueUp, and the basic original TrueUp feature, and see that I was actually wrong with the assumption the Calories are being exchanged with UTS or with Physio TrueUp. In fact neither of these two features handles Calories. Calories are being handled by the oldest and most simple feature TrueUp (not to be confused with Physio TrueUp). It is described here:

What Is the Garmin Connect TrueUp Feature and How Does It Work? | Garmin Customer Support

Your primary wearable device is set in Garmin Connect and is the one device that will break any tiebreakers with other activity trackers. Data from your primary wearable device will always trump other devices when the data is equal and recorded at the same time. This avoids the same data being counted more than once.

So in other words - in fact, Calories (and also Floors, Intensity Minutes, and Steps) always come from the Primary Wearable Device (PWD; your watch), regardless which device you use for recording the activity. Only if the data from the PWD is not available, the data from the secondary device is used. It means if you want that Calories from Edge are being used, you have to remove the watch from the wrist while using Edge (disabling the internal HR sensor should have the same effect).

The way you suggested would work too to get Calories based on the data from the powermeter, like it is the case with Edge. Just you would have to discard one of the activities at the end, to avoid the duplicate. And in some cases, some of the metrics (namely the Training Load) might get double-counted even if you discard one of the activities. Though that should only happen when one of the devices did not support the Unified Training Status.

Thanks a lot. I've my 965 set as primary wearable and Edge 1040 as primary activity count (I think it is called like that.) I hope Garmin finds a solution as it all worked fine with my other combos starting from the 530 and 925.

trux said:

So in other words - in fact, Calories (and also Floors, Intensity Minutes, and Steps) always come from the Primary Wearable Device (PWD; your watch), regardless which device you use for recording the activity. Only if the data from the PWD is not available, the data from the secondary device is used. It means if you want that Calories from Edge are being used, you have to remove the watch from the wrist while using Edge (disabling the internal HR sensor should have the same effect).

That doesn't appear to be what actually happens though. I think that recorded activity calories take precedence over out of activity calories. I ride with my Edge 830, power meter and ext HRM an always have my watch on my wrist with active OHR. My calories for the activity  and on the synced Fenix 7 daily total are based on the EDGE recorded power. This is the case with all of my rides with the Edge going back a few years.

mcbit said:

I ride with my Edge 830, power meter and ext HRM an always have my watch on my wrist with active OHR.

Edge 830 does not support Unified Training Status, it is an older generation, so it may be the reason why it syncs differently.

But as you said calories are synced by base True-Up rather than anything else.

However since Garmin want us to wear our watches 24/7 I would think that wearing a passive watch whilst recording on a Edge computer would be a very common and normal situation and would also be a bit surprised if the watch over-wrote the activity calories.

mcbit said:

But as you said calories are synced by base True-Up rather than anything els

That's what is written in the documentation. Older models not using the same system of syncing may perhaps work differently.

mcbit said:

However since Garmin want us to wear our watches 24/7 I would think that wearing a passive watch whilst recording on a Edge computer would be a very common and normal situation and would also be a bit surprised if the watch over-wrote the activity calories.

Unfortunately I cannot influence how Garmin decided to make it working with the latest generation of devices. I can only tell you how it works (or is supposed to work), and what you can do to achieve the results you expect. If you want that Garmin changes the current functionality, you will have to contact them and request a change. They have a form for that purpose at Share Ideas | Garmin, but you can also call the Support. However, I would not keep the hopes for a change too high - there would likely have to be thousands of similar request from other users, in order to change their mind.

I do not want Garmin to change any functionality, it works just fine for me as the calories generated on the edge are represented correctly on my watch and i think that is the intended behaviour..

Having checked again, it seems that the only effect of UTS is a 2 way sync of Training status and that the non-UTS device cannot be set as the PTD. Which means if I do an activity on my watch it will not be updated on the TS on the Edge which again is just fine as I only need to view my TS on a watch or on Connect where it is UTS.

My only point from the start is that the OP recording on the Edge whilst wearing the watch passively should see the Edge calories on the watch if it is his PTD also TS on the watch and Edge should be the same since both are UTS compatible.

mcbit said:

My only point from the start is that the OP recording on the Edge whilst wearing the watch passively should see the Edge calories on the watch if it is his PTD also TS on the watch and Edge should be the same since both are UTS compatible.

The OP complains about Active Calories recorded by Edge 1040 not being shown in Garmin Connect, which is exactly as it is supposed to work, as long as he wears the Primary Wearable Device in the same time.

The fact it works differently with older models like Edge 830 is interesting, but will not help the users with current devices. They need to understand how it works with their equipment, and learn how to use them to achieve the expected results.

trux said:

What Is the Garmin Connect TrueUp Feature and How Does It Work? | Garmin Customer Support

Your primary wearable device is set in Garmin Connect and is the one device that will break any tiebreakers with other activity trackers. Data from your primary wearable device will always trump other devices when the data is equal and recorded at the same time. This avoids the same data being counted more than once.

Hey just caught up with these replies, thank you very helpful.  I was actually trying out the same thing on an indoor ride with the Edge 1040 recording the activity and this time I removed the watch and yes this time the Garmin GC True Up uses the Edge HRM and accurately shows the HR for calorie calculation.  You can see in attached where the graph changes from watch to edge and back to watch.  Also screen shots of active calories correctly calculated.

So I guess that explains the intermittent behaviour seen while passively wearing watch and recording the activity on Edge.  On most occasions in past the Watch HR in passive mode from wrist sensor is recording a far lower HR than the Edge with HRM strap. This is more exaggerated on shorter indoor high intensity rides, but not so different on a 4 hour z2 outdoor ride!! So not sure how that can be improved, is it a fault with watch or just because it doesn't read HR from optical sensor very often while in passive wrist mode?

What about making the Edge 1040 the Primary Training Device - all will that mess up all the other metric sync?