Solar battery life not up to specs, much worse than with 7-year-old Fenix 5 Sapphire?

Hi Garmin team,

I upgraded from a Fenix 5 Sapphire to the Fenix 8 Solar Sapphire in April. On paper, the battery life looked like a huge improvement — but in practice, it’s the opposite.
My Fenix 5 consistently exceeded the advertised battery life by 1.5–2x. The Fenix 8 gives me roughly 1/3 of the claimed runtime, and only about half of what I used to get from the 7-year-old Fenix 5. That’s really disappointing.

I’ve seen similar complaints here on the forum and Reddit and etc, so it’s clearly not an isolated case.
Something feels off — is there a known issue with power management on the 8 Solar?

To be clear, I don’t use any advanced features constantly:

Only 24/7 heart rate + Bluetooth notifications
Wi-Fi is disabled completely
ECG and SpO₂ were tested just a few times early on

Despite being very happy with the general performance and design of the Fenix 8, the battery life is a major letdown — and in my opinion, not in line with what Garmin advertises.

You have access to my Garmin account and device data — feel free to compare usage patterns and settings between my current Fenix 8 and my old Fenix 5. Nothing in my daily routine or setup changed significantly.

Is this something you're already investigating, or do you consider this “normal” behavior?

Thanks in advance for any feedback or explanation.

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0 MDPennock 4 months ago

Garmin have been "investigating" this for at least 5 months: https://forums.garmin.com/outdoor-recreation/outdoor-recreation/f/fenix-8-series/382952/fenix-8-amoled-47mm---battery-drain/1860051#1860051

Posts like this are either ghosted or locked with this comment and a link to this thread.

We get no news or updates, and if it weren't for the user manual quoting 21 days (47mm) 30 days (51mm) we would be getting "this is by design"...

0 TODD D 4 months ago in reply to MDPennock

I am also experiencing less than advertised battery out of my 51mm solar. I reached out to Garmin and was told to revert back to stock watch face/app/settings and test. I did that and still had a drain.

Currently I'm enrolled in their battery monitoring where they will review usage to see if there is anything that stands out as a particular drain.

Mine can never get more than two weeks between charge. I need to plan on plugging it in between 10 to 14 days. About half of what was advertised..

I've pulled back display brightness to 5% and turned off SpOx until this gets resolved. I can live with the dim display but I want to measure oxygen saturation

0 Oula 4 months ago

I had the same watch and changed it to the AMOLED version which gets much better battery life. Something is definitely wrong with the solar version (also with the 47mm Solar version).

With my 51mn AMOLED version I get about 21 days with 15h of GPS timr.

0 7509909 4 months ago in reply to Oula

This problem exist not only for solar version. My 51mm amoled drain battery for 15% per day. Garmin investigating my logs now, for about 3 weeks.

0 Oula 4 months ago in reply to 7509909

Ok. Interesting. The battery life for my 51mm AMOLED has been brilliant.

Data dash WF, no AOD, Bluetooth on, no PulseOx, Wifi off and Garmin share off.

Batter drain without GPS activity with those settings is about 3% per day.

0 3908394 4 months ago in reply to Oula

Il mio amoled da 51 mm con pulse Ox spento, gesto spento(attivo lo schermo con la mano per vedere l'orario alcune volte al giorno), wifi spento, GPS spento, bluetooth attivo e collegato a connect durante il giorno (no notte), FC attiva, allenamenti in palestra a giorni alterni da poco più di 1 ora, consume circa il 2,8 % al giorno , 24 giorni fino al 28% poi ricarico. Penso rientri nelle specifiche Garmin.

0 esselite 4 months ago

Garmin has problem, because this issue does not occur for all the users. there are watches with stellar battery life. My AMOLED 51mm has 21-23 days (AOD off) with 3-5h GPS activities per week. That is fair enough 4-5%/day, but still there are users reporting 15% daily usage, which is odd.

0 esselite 4 months ago in reply to Oula

Yes, I can confirm same , for same watch model.