Battery life

I have a Garmin Fenix 7 Sapphire Solar. I've already looked into some ways to extend my battery life. I train four times a week (a run of about 1 hour) and cycle to and from work every day. I think too many features were enabled, which caused my battery to last only one week. I do listen to music on it during my bike ride to and from work (4 km).

I want to disable as many unnecessary features as possible when I’m not working out (though I still want my body battery and heart rate to be continuously tracked).

What else could or should I possibly disable or adjust to extend the battery life?

  • Yes, thanks for the tip. I recently disabled pulse ox.
    If you have other things that can help, please let me know :) 

  • Listening to music, drains the battery fast.

  • One week with the use you describe seems about right. If battery life is a major concern for you, you may wanna make some adjustments:

    • Don't play music from your watch during your commute. Play it from your phone instead or ... listen to your environment. I also bike a lot, both in a major city to commute and countryside for race bike tours. As a biker, I'm vulnerable on the road and can become a danger myself to kids and pedestrians. Keeping my ears free helps keep me aware of my surroundings and alerts me of dangers earlier. I also found I actually enjoy the soundscape of the city waking up in the morning and the nature sounds and quiet during countryside rides.
    • Put it in airplane mode. I found I don't need a permanent connection with my phone. You lose the ability to listen to music, but that's your biggest battery drain anyway, so if you're not willing to make that adjustment, we can stop right here. You'll also lose phone notifications being replayed on your watch, but to me they were ADHD-inducing distractions. I even turned off notifications on my phone for almost everything. I don't need to get yanked out of whatever I'm doing and react immediately to every whim some social media account tries to throw at me. So, no loss there. I briefly turn airplane mode off 2-3 times a day to sync my watch and that's enough.
    • Navigation satellites: I leave it on Auto Select, that should be fine. Just make sure it's not set to All + Multi-Band, that will drain your battery fast. You can also consider setting it to GPS Only for extra savings.
    • Settings > System > Display > General Use > Brightness: Turn it down a bit. If you keep Auto Backlight on, the watch will automatically adjust brightness to light conditions, but you can still select a low / mid / high range from the Brightness setting. Set it to low. Or consider turning Auto Backlight off. Then the Brightness setting lets you set a specific level manually that always applies when the backlight is on. I have it at 5%, the lowest level. That's good enough indoors and in sunlight, you don't need any backlight anyway due to the MIP screen.
    • Pulse Ox, was already mentioned. Set to only manual measures (the default setting).
    • Use a simple watch face. Watch faces that are loaded with data displays use more resources.
    • Disable the touch screen. One less electronic component that needs to stay powered. When I turned touch off the other day, the battery predictor jumped from 8 days to 9 days. There's a convenient short-cut: hold the start/stop button on the top-right and the down button on the bottom-left at the same time for about 1-2 sec and it switches touch on / off. I turn it on when I'm about to play around with my watch to not wear out the mechanical buttons and turn it off again when I'm done.

    On the small F7S, I get about 10+ days on a full charge that way with 4-5 workouts per week and 24/7 heart rate monitoring, although I never fully deplete the battery (better for battery maintenance). I typically charge once a week and the indicator shows 3 or so days left.

  • I wasn’t aware either that music consumes so much. Thanks in advance for the tips, everyone!