16.11 Instinct 2 Solar battery drain issue.

I have charged it to a 100% several times leaving it for longer on the charging cable.

It took less than 24h to discharge sevral times to zero and turn off after.

I also don't believe that the battery calibration would be so much off for the watch, where it's supposed to lose 0.5-1% per hour, but instead looses 4-5% per hour. Calibration might have helped with some slight misalignment, but not when the difference is several times the norm.

Alex said:

I also don't believe that the battery calibration would be so much off for the watch, where it's supposed to lose 0.5-1% per hour, but instead looses 4-5% per hour.

For the calibration the max and the min voltage of the battery has to be established. If the calibration is gone for some reason, the gauge will show just any nonsense. Even 100% per hour is possible. Without really letting it discharged till it turns off, the bottom limit will not be reestablished. And sometimes you have to repeat the cycle again.

Besides that, there are also some other steps recommended in the guide - checking for updates with Garmin Express, because if there is a pending update, and the BT connection is not reliable (interferences with WiFi on the phone are common, since it uses the same 2.4 GHz band), it can drain the battery too. And to exclude it completely, it is also recommended to turn off BT on the watch completely, during the testing.

And of course, disabling PulseOx, Connect IQ watchfaces & apps, and other power hungry options, is the first thing you should always do in case of similar issues, but I assume you know that.

If nothing of it helps, then only Garmin can

Thanks a lot for putting the effort into the guide and explanations! I believe it's helped many people already!

Exact issue. Makes the watch almost unusable. It dies before I get home from work. Immediately started after update a few days ago.

Did You get the update OTA? Any other circumstances?

I strictly followed the instructions in the troubleshooting guide 4 times to recalibrate the battery gauge but had no success. As a final attempt, I did a Master Reset and the battery still lasts a few hours.
I saw that someone here got a replacement with the version 16.11 installed and there is no problem with the battery, which indicates that the problem is not in the software.
I believe it is not possible for me to get a replacement from Garmin since I bought it at the beginning of the year from a friend.
I bought this Instinct2 Solar as a everyday use watch, since I use a Fenix ​​for sports.
If I have to disable Bluetooth, heart rate monitor, step counter, PulseOX, reduce backlight, disable watch faces, etc., I should have bought a dumb G-Shock.

rvcosta said:

If I have to disable Bluetooth, heart rate monitor, step counter, PulseOX, reduce backlight, disable watch faces, etc., I should have bought a dumb G-Shock.

I would start with disabling PulseOx and 3rd party CIQ watchfaces. Those are both huge consumers of power, and unnecessary for proper functionality. Step counter cannot be disabled anyway, and I do not think anyone reasonable is advising to disable the HR sensor. Temporary disabling of BT may help pinpointing the reason of the increased battery drain, and fix it, but is in no way necessary for the normal functionality.

Hi trux I truly appreciate your promptness in responding and your effort in helping.
In other posts, you have stressed the high probability that the solution would be to recalibrate the battery gauge. Before I followed the recalibration steps, I had disabled everything you mentioned above.
Specifically regarding disabling BT to pinpoint and fix the issue, it seems to me that there is a gap here. Assuming that BT is the reason for the battery drain, the problem would be identified, but how would the fixing occur?

rvcosta said:

Assuming that BT is the reason for the battery drain, the problem would be identified, but how would the fixing occur?

As advised in the guide, the first thing to do before anything else, is connecting the watch over the USB cable to a computer with Garmin Express and checking for updates with it. You may even try it another time after disconnecting and reconnecting, to be sure no other  additional updates are still pending.

Pending updates may consume a lot of power, especially if the BT and Wi-Fi channels are close to each other, and/or the phone does not have a good separation filters. BT and Wi-Fi use the same frequency band. Especially Samsung Galaxy S2* models, and then plenty of low-cost Android phones suffer from it. So another possibility to fix high drain caused by BT, is switching the Wi-Fi on your phone from the 2.4 MHz band to the 5 GHz mode (as long as the phone and the Wi-Fi AP support it). Another option is resetting the network (Wi-Fi and BT) in Android's settings - it may help redistributing the channels slightly farther away from each other, which may help.

Then, you should make sure there is always only a single device paired with the watch in the proximity. If you paired it with multiple devices (phone, tablets, computers), there will be interferences, and again it will lead to slow transmissions, and to increased power consumption.

Then you can observe when the drain is the highest. If it is for example during the night, then perhaps the watch tries to connect to the phone that is farther away, somewhere on the limit of its range, and again it pushes the watch to increase the transmission power, and do repeated attempts.