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Fenix 7X Solar charging stopped working

emX0R
over 3 years ago

Hello,

shortly after firmware upgrade of my Fenix 7X Solar watch to 7.24, the solar charging seem to be stopped working.

It is not very sunny still here where I live but every day when I was out running it got at least something - I could see LUXes in the widget and also circle data field was changing.

After FW upgrade I went for a run, it detected sunlight but when I finished it looks like it got stuck at 2% - even though I was at home so there should not be anything.

https://ibb.co/c61Zdpv

The day after, watch does not detect sunlight at all. I went out running for 1hr and they got nothing. When I noticed that I tried to put them out when Sun was shining for a moment - again nothing, circle was not changing, solar widget is also empty.

I tried to power-cycle the watch and also reset to default setting neither helped

  • +1 over 3 years ago

    I am sorry your watch has an issue. I am sending you a direct PM.

  • 0 over 3 years ago

    Keep in mind that if the battery is too full, it will not be charged either.

  • +1 over 3 years ago

    You'll need to do a full factory reset, including data and everything. That fixed it when the same thing happened to me earlier this week. If not, then it may be a hardware issue.

  • 0 over 3 years ago in reply to C.sco

    thanks, just did full reset. And will check that out tomorrow. It's already night here so no chance to catch some sunlight :)

  • 0 over 3 years ago

    I'm having this issue again...

    Same thing that happened before.

    Tried to reboot my watch, and it got stuck on the Fenix 7 logo screen, wouldn't proceed to the watchface despite several attempts to restart it. Finally it booted to the watchface after I plugged it in to my PC. But upon rebooting, solar has stopped working again, shows only 5% or so in full sunlight.

    Sounds like I need to do yet another factory reset... Garmin really needs to fix these stability issues, it's driving me nuts.

  • 0 over 3 years ago in reply to C.sco

    If you can get it back working after few resets you are still lucky. In my case resets did not help anymore. Even service menu was not detecting any solar power at all. Currently waiting for replacement 14 days already :(

  • 0 over 3 years ago in reply to emX0R

    Turns out it was my mistake (sort of).

    When I used my PC to reboot my watch (since it was failing to boot on its own for some reason, seems to happen sometimes), it also charged my watch to 100% and so that's likely why solar wasn't working right. After it dropped down to 95%, it seems to be working fine now.

    The reason I say it's "sort of" my fault, is that the watch is not behaving as expected when the watch has too much charge for solar to work.

    It should display a different solar icon to indicate that charging is disabled, and either:

    1. Show nothing in the solar graph, and 0 lux hours
    2. Show normal solar in the graph, and normal lux hours

    But it does neither of those things. It displays the normal solar icon, and displays wrong numbers (extremely low, but not 0) in the solar chart and lux hours. Hence my confusion.

  • 0 over 3 years ago

    At the moment I have a similar situation with my 7X, the second time I charged (from purchase) it after two months of use via USB and upgraded it to 7.35. The first thing I noticed is that the solar panel doesn't really detect the sun. Virtually no battery charge. on the other hand, I will wait until the battery is below 95%. Because I think it is watch protection and only works up to about 95%. Will inform you about the changes...

  • 0 over 3 years ago in reply to P.J.

    I can confirm this is the case.  Alternatively, you can try and run a 'high power' activity, such as GPS to test.  You should see the solar panel start to work at high efficiency while GPS is running, even at high battery charge.