Garmin Instinct 2 Surf Mavericks - Extreme Battery Drain

I do not own Instinct 2 Surf Mavericks, just the Standard edition, but since the Surf activity is now available on all Instinct 2 models, I tested it on mine, too. I started the activity, kept all default settings, GPS, Bluetooth, HR - all remained enabled. Additionally, I started also the timer in the background, to alert me each 15 min, to take the battery reading.

I've kept it running for 3 hours. The battery dropped by 1-2% (in average 1.3%) each 15 min. It is also interesting that the longer the activity ran (or the lower the battery level was), the slower the discharging was. While in the first 15 mins, the level dropped by 3%, the last 1½ hour it dropped by 1%, and the last 15 minutes it did not drop at all. That could be because the discharging curve of the battery is not linear.

During the three hours, it dropped from the starting 73% to the final 57%. It projects to ~19 hours of battery life, if fully charged. It is still short of the ideal case of up to 30 hours in the specifications, but considering that the watch is already more than two years old, that there was also the timer running in the background, and that the Surf activity may be more CPU hungry than other activity types, I think it is still rather acceptable time.

So perhaps you could try testing a different I2 model yourself too, and see whether it gets better, though it is hard to imagine that certain model behaves differently than another one. The hardware is the same.

... also please note, that if you did the test without previously calibrating the battery indicator by going through the full charging cycle (full charge - full discharge) at least twice, the battery level indicator may not be sufficiently accurate.

So besides doing the test over several hours, and not just the first 15 minutes (when the discharging may be indeed seemingly faster), you should make sure the watch was already sufficiently calibrated to learn the true min and max voltage limits of its battery.

Is the problem the power consumption rate during the activity or are you saying it continues at that rate after you stop and save the activity?

If it is during the activity, I think you might consider which settings can tradeoff power vs function?  I.e. Do you disable the phone link or keep it active? Have the higher or lower power satellite tracking?  Have pulse-ox enabled or disabled?

I have the same issuse. I bought this watch, and for 2 weeks everything goes fine, I do climbing, I do yoga, biking and normally charging. Right now I am in surf sport, and after activating my 1st surf session, my battery just die at night with 100% battery before sleeping. It is just couple of hours without any activites during the day. 

This is a joke :D

and…!!! This „the best surf watch” doesn’t count paddling, missing my waves and instead of my waves I have some weird trace in a water recorded.

I have had the Garmin instinct 2 solar surf edition for around 7 months, went surfing last week an have the same issue since using the surf activity for the first time. 

Hello,
I also have the surf edition, and after using the surf application in several sessions without problem, finally the watch battery failed with the same problem 2 weeks after purchasing it.

This watch is very bad, it does not make good readings of the surf session and the battery also fails.

I feel like I've thrown my money away

Have just suffered the same problem... It's the 3rd watch and happened again

I have the same issue after my first surf session and at night after fully charged it drained all the battery in few hours

I have the Instinct 2 solar tactical edition, same thing has just happened to me.

Went surfing for the first time two days ago and since my watch is unusable. Battery drains from 100% to dead in a matter of hours.

I’ve tried full factory resetting, turning off all sensors, battery saver mode etc. and nothing seems to work. I don’t know what to do and if I’d have known that using the surf activity was going to destroy my watch I would have never done it. What a bummer.