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garmin instinct solar tactical

my garmin instinct solar tactical only lasts for 11-12 days, no GPS usage, 4-5 hrs activity tracking, pulse ox off, 24/7 HR monitor. I read from other forums it should last atlest 20-25 days. 

  • Same with me. No one cares. Cue the fanboys.

    I suggest you save this as a PDF for future reference:

    https://www8.garmin.com/manuals/webhelp/GUID-A298EB1C-21D9-430F-8D06-A2CC74E5D5E9/EN-US/GUID-BCA44331-7CAC-4734-9222-6066B05C32AB.html

    Battery Life

    Battery Life With Solar

    Mode

    Up to 24 days

    Up to 24 days plus 30 days1

    Smartwatch mode with activity tracking and 24/7 wrist-based heart rate monitoring

    BTW, my car goes up to 200 mph* (*downhill, on special gas, in a vacuum, with a piano in the boot)

  • I am the owner of a regular Garmin Solar. I am very happy with the watch. This is a very good device. But the autonomy of 24 days with the pulse measurement turned on and so on is a marketing deception. I own a watch for one year. However, with all the measurements turned on (GPS is turned off), the clock never lived for more than 14 days. I recently conducted a test. Turned off the pulse. Turned off tracking of all activities. There are only notifications from the phone left. The watch survived for 30 days. Consequently, Garmin is deceiving customers about real autonomy. The autonomy is good, but in reality it is much less than what Garmin indicates.

  • @7546996 Finally. Thank you. I also like this watch, which is why I bought it. However, this forum and Garmin and their technical support are a mixture of delusion and self-delusion. I got the same watch from Amazon as a replacement and for three days wore them in parallel. The battery went down at *exactly* the same pace. The battery life is not *one iota* better than on a Vivoactive HR from three years ago. In reality, without solar you can probably reach about 12 days, 14 at best, and with *a lot* of sun maybe 16-18 days.

    And, no, I don't want to get started about the battery life of C***s watches, or why more and more US companies are trying to enforce arbitration instead of class action in their T&Cs.

  • yeah. i think their estimated days is misleading. i tested it again and this is my 3rd charge for a month:  total 1 hour and 10 mins of gps, total 3 hrs of activity tracking, 24/7 HR monitor, notifications for FB mesenger only in silent mode, and it gave me a measly 8 1/2 days. my fitbit ionic is better to think it uses colored screen and lasts for 7 days with same set up.  how can I bring this watch in my usual 5hr long mountain biking? 

  • What I find so deeply frustrating is that *Garmin really do not care*. They really do not. My old Vivoactive HR also had a better battery life with a colour touch screen and an analogue watchface with many cool complications, but the GPS chipset sucked the battery dry pretty quickly. Apart from that, with IQ widgets it had *all* the features the Instinct Solar has.

    The frustrating part is the very low forum engagement of Garmin watch users. I think it's just human, people tend to not bother if it's too much work involved. Amazon makes it easy to send things back at the beginning, beyond that people mostly just accept their fate. Also, Amazon as one of the main retail outlets puts all Instinct and Instinct Solar reviews together, so it's really difficult to filter out specific negative reviews, which is very okay with Garmin, I would think.

    I contacted Garmin tech support in my country, and the guy was friendly, but basically I hit a total wall of **. He didn't really care or even believe my issues, said I should send the watch in so they can *analyse* it - what is there to analyse?, it does not deliver. There seems to be a *very* strong group-think going on at Garmin, where those staying longer than maybe a year accept that all customers complaining basically are the exception or don't know what they're talking about.

  • The Watch is an Expensive piece of Rubbish , Nothing but Problems !