My Instinct 2 Solar battery life does not make sense

Former Member over 2 years ago

I'm confused about the battery life on my new Instinct 2 Solar. The specs say it will get potentially unlimited life with solar charging in smartwatch mode. After fully charging the watch to 100%, it shows I have 23 days left. From what I have seen though, the standard Instinct 2 gets 28 days in smartwatch mode. So why am I seeing just 23 days when fully charged with my solar? I have confirmed that pulse OX is on manual and the readings are with no GPS workouts.

Additionally, I'm losing about 8% to 9% battery life per day. At that rate, this device will only last 11 to 12 days assuming there is no solar boost in charging. What am I missing or not understanding?

Top Replies

All Replies

0 9098866 over 2 years ago

If you're at 100% charge and you're showing 23 days something is eating your battery. Could be a sensor turned on, could be the watch face your using and how often it has to ping weather, could have the backlight turned on all the time or by gestures. These are all guesses though. If you want your battery life back i would start by doing a factory reset to bring you back to normal settings, then start changing it back to the way you had it ONE setting at a time and figure out what is causing your power draw. Furthermore the 28 days would only happen if you never touch your watch, never turn on the backlight, never do a activity, etc. These all impact battery life.

0 AztecMountain over 2 years ago in reply to 9098866

Yea, mine says 9 days at full charge %100, do you know if there is something in particular I can turn off? I have pretty normal settings I believe

0 9098866 over 2 years ago in reply to AztecMountain

That low I would check if you have pulse OX enabled all the time. It's unnecessary and severely hurts battery life.

0 Former Member over 2 years ago

I reset the watch to factory settings and it went back to 28 days. I then determined that changing the backlight from 20% to 60% brightness lowered the battery level to 23 days. I'm going to assume that's also why the battery reduction seems high as well.

0 Former Member over 2 years ago in reply to 9098866

Had Pulse ox to manual. The backlight setting was impacting the battery life.

0 AztecMountain over 2 years ago in reply to 9098866

Yup that was exactly it, I turned it off and now it says 29 days. Hey can you say why its unnecessary? I don't really know what it is but you seem to know about this stuff

0 5963464 over 2 years ago in reply to Former Member

I'm going to assume that's also why the battery reduction seems high as well.

no it is not so evident.

if you effectively use the backlight then ok, the lost is understandable.

but if you don't use the backlight, if you just set the backlight to 60%, then what is the reason of the 8-9% lost per day?

0 5963464 over 2 years ago in reply to Former Member

The backlight setting was impacting the battery life.

do you have the backlight constantly on?

0 Former Member over 2 years ago in reply to 5963464

Yeah... good point and question. I was just wondering that too. I might change the backlight to be brighter but assuming I never use it why would it drop down by 5 days? This leads me to ponder how the watch calculates the days left.

0 Former Member over 2 years ago in reply to 5963464

No. It's set to gesture off.