Terrible Fenix 6S Battery Life

I got my Fenix 6S last week and have noticed the battery only works for about 36 hours before it is completely drained. I have turned off pulse ox and HRM and it doesn't make a difference. The battery direction says 8 days, but it is completely wiped out in 36 hours (and that's without doing any workouts or using music!). So unless I'm completely exhausted losing time to sleep, this is a complete miss. Software is up to date.

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  • That definitely seems too low. I have the 6X which is rated at 21 days, but I actually do get the full 21 days (or, presumably, I would get the full 21 days if I didn't do any activities). I actually get about 10 days in real life, because of recording activities almost every day. So, figuring that my battery is about 3x larger than the battery in the 6S, the 6S should still get 3-8 days (depending on how many activities you record), all other things being equal.

    So I'm guessing 1 of 2 things is happening with your watch:

    1. Check your settings again to make sure there's nothing seriously draining it. Is your screen brightness turned up really high, with a long timeout? You said PulseOX is turned off, but there are actually 2 places you need to turn it off; there's all-day PulseOX tracking, and there's also Sleep PulseOX tracking. Both need to be turned off to maximize battery. You should be able to leave HRM turned on, though, and still get 3-8 days of battery.
    2. Could just be a bad battery, in which case contact Garmin and they'll take care of it for you.

    I charged my watch to 100% exactly 36 hours ago, and it's now at 88%. I have both PulseOX settings turned off, but my HRM is turned on 24/7. Again, figuring that my battery is roughly 3x bigger than the 6S battery, if my watch had the 6S battery then it would have only dropped to 64% after 36 hours. So something must be either draining the battery that still needs to be turned off, or there's something up with the battery.

  • Hi I had a similar issue with my Fenix 5 Plus. New out of box, charged for a few hours, multiple resets, software was up to date. I was dropping 20% of battery in 24 hours with no Bluetooth, music, wifi, apps and was running standard watch face. 

    Called Garmin and the customer rep was very helpful happy to provide a swap or refund. Maybe best to give Garmin a call. 

  • One other thing to note, is that we often play with our new tech gadgets A LOT more than usual in the first few days we have them. I'm certainly guilty of that, I've already spend many, many hours tinkering with the menus and configuring my activities, and trying out all the features. It no doubt took its toll on my first battery charge. However, once I'm done setting it up the way I want and spending countless hours playing with all the different features, I'd expect the battery will start lasting a lot longer.

  • With my F5S+ it had horrible battery life for the first 5-6 charge cycles and then it started getting gradually better until it started matching the specs. My 945 never had such an issue though and got claimed battery life from the start.

  • Om my F6PS I'm still expected to get 16 days (yes 16!) after 2 days of use in SW mode. Battery Widget is confirming this.

    Like everybody else the first day I was fiddling all the time with all possibilities and the expectation dropped from 15 to 11 days by the time I went to bed. Now I just use is as a SW and tada!

    However, if you only get 36 hours after having updated your firmware, did a reset and full charge there's probably something wrong. Before you return it you might want to install Battery Widget which is now released for the F6 to look at hourly drain. Mine is about -0.250%/h so yours should be well below 0.4 (you can calculate that number yourself, don't have the S specs at hand)

  • Sounds a lot like i experienced with my 6Xpro --> battery-issues-6x-pro

    Even in battery saver it would discharge 3% per hour.

    My unit would even fully discharge in the same 36hours when switched off... 

    I did reach out to Garmin-Heath and GarminEU support. The unit is now with GarminEU / Netherlands for further investigation.....

  • On that note, we got your device in already and looking into it.  Thank you again for working with us so we can get a device displaying this issue and use it to find out why this is happening.  We could not make this great of a product without you and everyone else's feedback!

  • I got my Fenix 6s about 3 weeks ago and had the same issue. I tried resetting the device and tweaking multiple settings to increase the battery life but nothing helped. The battery was drained after about 2 days with 1 activity of 1 to 1.5 hour.

    I went to the store where I purchased the device and immediately got another watch (the same s6 off course). This resolved all my problems. With the initial watch, the battery decreased with about 20% during 1 night with power mode enabled. The new watch only takes about 4% for a night.