Battery life is horrid because of heart rate

I complained to Garmin about my battery, they gave me some generic spiel about how to improve battery life.
So I decided to do some testing (been using my instinct for the last few months to do testing on my Fenix 6).

Basically the battery on my wrist lasts ~6 days... but off my wrist it lasts a long time (was about %30 drained after a week!).

I thought that this may be due to the fact the heart rate sensor seems to sleep after a while, until the watch is moved.. so I disabled the heart rate sensor, and wore it and found the same.. it seems to be that the standard heart rate sensor (not measuring ox) is detrimental to the battery life!

Also battery life of my Fenix 6 I found was lasting 6 days - but when I disable the heart rate monitor it would last over 20 (logging no activities)! - it would be good to have individual options to set the interval while - examples of intervals also provided below based on what I would want to set:

normal (off)
sleeping (every 5 mins)
in activity (every 1 second)

Please respond if you want to see this feature ... and try it and post back if you find your battery life to be poor too (I know that you probably still want to log it in activities, and I know that reenabling it for activities can be a pain... so let Garmin know - and hopefully we can see this implemented)!

Top Replies

eezytiger over 3 years ago +4

Battery specs are listed here - https://www8.garmin.com/manuals/webhelp/fenix66s6xpro/EN-US/GUID-694C4E14-D875-479F-AFB1-2A6A582FF506.html

A Fenix 6 (not 6S or 6X) should last up to 14 days with 24x7 heart…
Ɛpsilon over 3 years ago in reply to i00 +2

No I'm against hamstringing old features. 24x7 hr is used for a lot of the fitness features. If you disable that, your health features accuracy will suffer
Ɛpsilon over 3 years ago +1

Personally the 1-2 sec sampling is what I want about the watch so whereas I think some configuration would be nice, I want the current setting to remain as is. HR and GPS are always going to be battery…

All Replies

0 Ɛpsilon over 3 years ago

Personally the 1-2 sec sampling is what I want about the watch so whereas I think some configuration would be nice, I want the current setting to remain as is. HR and GPS are always going to be battery users as they require sensors and processing. No HR and logging no activities means you're basically wearing the Fenix as a glorified Timex :)

24x7 HR is used for a lot of the health and recovery stats as in-activity data so you're basically hamstringing the watch if you switch 24x7 HR off or reduce it's sampling to reduce its accuracy

0 Ɛpsilon over 3 years ago in reply to Ɛpsilon

One way to really improve the battery life is to use Power Manager to switch off BT and WIFI at night during sleep, and switch to a low power watch face. My 6x then only uses ~1% battery life overnight doing this and I lose nothing in tracking

0 i00 over 3 years ago in reply to Ɛpsilon

So you are against adding new features, just because you won't use it?

0 Ɛpsilon over 3 years ago in reply to i00

No I'm against hamstringing old features. 24x7 hr is used for a lot of the fitness features. If you disable that, your health features accuracy will suffer

0 Ɛpsilon over 3 years ago in reply to Ɛpsilon

Besides if you want to disable 24x7 hr and still have activities HR - that's possible already using the power manager profiles. For example, I actually do the opposite and switch OFF wrist hr for activities as I have a hr strap. So what you could do is switch off the HR globally, for the activities you do do setup a power profile that switches HR back ON and then set up a power profile for Sleep that also switches it back on.

0 eezytiger over 3 years ago

Battery specs are listed here - https://www8.garmin.com/manuals/webhelp/fenix66s6xpro/EN-US/GUID-694C4E14-D875-479F-AFB1-2A6A582FF506.html

A Fenix 6 (not 6S or 6X) should last up to 14 days with 24x7 heart rate monitoring, according to spec. If yours does not then maybe your watch has a problem that needs attention. I suggest contacting Garmin support.

FWIW I have a 6X Pro Solar and I charge it once per week, charging to 80% and still having 20-30% left or even more one week later. I use 24x7 heart rate, never use battery saver and record activities most days of the week. The only feature I have disabled is pulse-ox, which serves no useful purpose for me at 45m above sea level.

0 iNDEX3 over 3 years ago in reply to eezytiger

eezytiger said:
A Fenix 6 (not 6S or 6X) should last up to 14 days with 24x7 heart rate monitoring, according to spec

I would be very happy if this were true for my 6X. But the truth from 100 to 4 percent looks different.
I checked the battery by charging the watch through the tester. The battery is normal.

0 Ɛpsilon over 3 years ago in reply to iNDEX3

Ouch - just looked at my device usage widget and I have similar uptime (and an hour more GPS) but I'm at 64%. Are you using anything CIQ that could be misbehaving?

0 Ɛpsilon over 3 years ago in reply to Ɛpsilon

Though I have noticed...

I have an hour less backlight than you, and only 43min OHR scan... and an hou less BLE and ANT+... so something there perhaps? I use a HRM run for activities so that may explain the OHR scan thing but the BLE/ANT+ .. well I'd suspect the ANT+ to be lower for you. I do make it a habit of switching OFF the wrist strap scan in Sensors-Accessories - would it be worth you doing the same to test if it's an excessive sensor scan killing your battery?

0 iNDEX3 over 3 years ago in reply to Ɛpsilon

I use the watch face from the store. Now I will fully charge and switch to the watch face from Garmin.