Solar charging not working?

You should see solar charge intensity within 2 seconds or so on the solar widget if it's directly pointing to the sun. So no need to wait for long time. It won't charge if it's very hot or if battery is full. Since you have latest beta it would show if battery is too full to do solar charging.

Note I also posted that if the watch is just outside direct sunlight, you won't get charge or only 10% or so. From the picture it looks like it could be indoors and not in direct sunlight.

If the photo is taken indoors, as it looks like, then you should be aware that although standard window glass is very well transparent for visible light, the infrared and ultraviolet parts of the light spectrum do not pass through the glass well at all. And since the transparent solar cells used in Garmin Instinct use exclusively the IR and UV parts of the spectrum, the watch behind a window screen will get only a small fraction of the available solar energy.

The watch in the picture was exposed into the direct sunlight. No windows etc whatsoever. Before that I left the watch sitting exposed to direct sunlight for approx 30 minutes and the solar intensity indication did not move even slight upwards. The screen shows single dots from time to time every 1-2 hours on average. This does not look correct to me.

The mentioned 2 seconds where I should see activity does not happen either.

Yes, there is definitely something wrong with your watch. I have not updated to 9.97, so I can't comment if it is the firmware or the watch itself.

Mine shows full sun power when I put it by the window on a sunny day and I don't think it is affected so much by the glass. It is true glass blocks a lot of UV light, but as per the manual, the "the solar charging lens is optimized for the spectrum of sunlight". This would mean it uses mostly yellow-greenish + some blue and maybe ultraviolet light.

Naturally, we can only speculate with how it works, but out of curiosity, I experimented and found that it charged 1% in 1 hour when I left it by the window under full intensity sunlight. Of course, I do not recommend anyone doing this, because it heated to 55 degrees, which is bad for the battery.

So, it should charge, even indoors, as long as there is sun shining upon it.

Hello,

I have exactly the same problem since yesterday.

I am in a sunny area, and my watch is 2 weeks old. Nothing happens !

Did you find a solution ?

Can GARMIN repair ? or change the watch ?

It's really annoying after such a short time...

Thanks,

Emmanuel 

Wait for the update that will fix this problem.

Same here with 9.97 not charging anymore.

Does sound broken unfortunately. I installed 9.94 and I think the only change was to improve the solar graph. I do see solar intensity go up  in sunlight after few seconds and get a charge of about 1% per hour. Best to contact Garmin.

The new copy is already working well? Perhaps the reason for the poor charging with the sun is updating to the latest version.