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Dear Garmin, please restore the core Power-Saving Function to our watches

sensovision
20 days ago

For years our watches could automatically switch to Battery Saver during the hours defined as Sleep Mode.

  • It preserved battery (typically 2-4 % per night on my fēnix 8).
  • It prevented late-night notifications when we forget to silence the phone.
  • It eliminated unnecessary night-time Bluetooth/Wi-Fi emissions.

Many of us deliberately chose Garmin over other brands because this small, thoughtful feature existed. Unfortunately, FW 15.31 (May 2025) removed the setting without warning. A Garmin moderator confirmed the change was “by design” two weeks ago https://forums.garmin.com/outdoor-recreation/outdoor-recreation/f/fenix-8-series/382678/airplane-battery-saver-mode-not-activated-during-sleep/1935832#

The result is a poorer user experience: the watch now polls for the phone all night, burns extra battery, and wakes light sleepers with “Phone disconnected” alerts—unless we remember to drill through menus every evening.

Kindly restore the automatic Battery-Saver/Sleep option (or at least give us a toggle in Power Manager).

Re-enabling it would:

Thank you for listening.

We kindly urge Garmin to bring back this feature in future updates. If you agree, please comment below and share your experience - let’s make our voices heard!

  • 0 20 days ago

       

    I had problems posting this thread for an hour, so I had to move images to external hosting, to experiment with the text, and cut it a bit to make it happen. 

    Here are photos from two nights of sleep. Look at Since last view... when I manually put the watch into Airoplane mode, the watch consumes only 0.128%/h, but when I do nothing on the new firmware and it stays online the consumption is 0.293/h or higher. 

  • 0 20 days ago

    100%

    Garmin, please acknowledge and re-include this functionality. It could be in a different guise, I.e. Disable WiFi & Disable Bluetooth options in the sleep mode menu.

  • 0 20 days ago

    Other than turning off Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, you can accomplish all of the above by customizing your Sleep Focus which can be done in Garmin Connect device settings.

    Until Garmin wishes to enable the feature again, you can manually turn off Bluetooth and Wi-fi with a control on the watch. No drilling through menus is necessary just two button pushes.

    FYI - with the sleep focus correctly customized, you should use very little battery during sleep.

  • 0 20 days ago in reply to kstate1980
    kstate1980 said:
    you can manually turn off Bluetooth and Wi-fi with a control on the watch

    sure, and that's what I do every night, when don't forget, and when I don't forget I get the results which you can see on image with consumption of 0.128%/h and when forget battery drain is raising significantly

    forums.garmin.com/.../1941109

  • 0 20 days ago in reply to sensovision

    I don't turn Bluetooth off at night and battery consumption is less than 1% so, any additional battery savings with Bluetooth turned off in minimal.

    This doesn't address your wish to avoid Bluetooth at night for your health reasons.

    I am not saying the feature you are requesting shouldn't be added back, I am suggesting a very simple work around until it comes back.

  • 0 19 days ago in reply to kstate1980

    which model do you have? I am still on 13.35 and I use battery saver mode with everything off except OHR, and I consume about 1-1.5% over 8 hours (hard to get more granular info given how garmin reports the battery percentage in whole numbers) for my 47mm AMOLED

  • 0 19 days ago in reply to derek87

    I've got the 51mm solar and get stellar battery life less than 4% per day.

    I expect the AMOLED will be greater than that but, it till holds that if you setup the Sleep Focus, with everything turned off, your battery usage at night will be reduced.

  • 0 19 days ago in reply to kstate1980

    that's fantastic. it's good to se someone out there who is getting close to spec'd battery life on the solar. I read lots of anecdotal disappointment with real life battery life on the Fenix 8 Solar, and that was one (of a a few) reason I ended up going AMOLED.

  • 0 19 days ago in reply to kstate1980

    I’ve been a Tactix user for years, and have always had the Battery Saver enabled during sleep (customised with HR enabled). On my Tactix 8 (Solar / MiP), this reduced battery usage at night (proven using the same widget as , and with similar results ~0.12%/h without external connections versus ~0.32%/h with) and allowed me to get, if not extend, the Garmin advertised ~31 day battery life.

    Garmin has had this functionality for years, and to remove it without an auto-enabling alternative, or even a warning, is just poor product dev / release. Maybe this feature removal to ease ticket-load into Customer Support says something about the Garmin user majority transitioning away from battery-preserving outdoorspeople to those who don’t read the manual…

    P.S. Manually disabling connections / enabling battery saver before sleep and re-enabling at wake up is an appalling work-around when a solution has existed for years. This is one for Garmin to fix ASAP. 

  • 0 18 days ago in reply to kstate1980
    kstate1980 said:
    I've got the 51mm solar and get stellar battery life less than 4% per day.

    Lucky you, myself, I never get even close to 4% per day. Of course I realize that 51mm has bigger battery, but still my watch has worse battery life than I had on non-solar Fenix 6 even that on paper it should be better. 

    Are you using any custom glances, datafields and HRM or other sensors during workouts?