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Body battery/stress broken on Instinct Solar? (My Venu is fine)

punkgeek
over 3 years ago

Hi. I've had a Venu for a while but a couple of months ago I purchased an Instinct Solar. I basically love it except "body battery" doesn't seem to work.

Problem description:

  • For months with the Venu I'd consistently (unless sick) wake up with a 70ish body battery. (yay)
  • For two months of wearing the Instinct Solar it would usually gain 0 or only a few points of body battery while I slept. If I look at the stress chart for the Instinct it shows basically constant stress while I'm sleeping, but if I look for the Venu it shows calmness.
  • I've tried rebooting the Instinct (and I gave it two months of time to learn my habits). No change.
  • I recently did an experiment of going back to the Venu for a week and the venu still looks great.
  • The heart rate logs for both watches seem approximately fine. I wear the watches just tight enough they don't jiggle on my wrists (good HR sensor contact).
  • They are both running the latest US firmware.

About the images:

Image 1 & 2: The most recent weekish shows a great venu body battery log, but the weeks prior on the Instinct were horrible. You can see the effect of me changing back to the Instinct mid-day on Sunday.

Image 3: This is the stress chart of my (subjectively pleasant) sleep last night with an Instinct. Basically solid stress.

Image 4: Here's my low stress Saturday. You can basically see where I switched to the Instinct about six PM.

Does anyone else see the same thing with your Instinct Solar? I'm trying to figure out how to possibly fix or if only my device is defective.

  • 0 over 3 years ago

    IMO, I feel that the Body Battery is not a very reliable standard on my Instinct. The only time it's high is if I take the watch off and just not wear it for a while (like a few days). Then when I first put it back on, its higher, then eventually tanks. Even on mornings when I wake up and feel I've had a great night's sleep, it just doesn't seem to a reliable marker. I've actually thought about looking into a different manufacture's device with that info, just to see if there is a difference. Maybe it's just person-dependent, or maybe I should just quit relying on that altogether. It just doesn't seem valuable at the moment.

  • 0 over 3 years ago in reply to WD

    Body battery works great on my Venu - so much so that I wished I could have a notification after I woke and the value was low (because retrospectively it was a great predictor of 'oh *** I'm going to be sick today').  But so far on the Instinct it seems DOA (because the instinct seems to show near 100% stress always).

    Someone on reddit said they are staying on version 14.00 (rather than upgrading to 16.00) and it is working good for them.  So I might try downgrading before blaming the hardware.  I'm also (ugh) going to try a "factory master reset" to see if that fixes things) - hard reset had no effect.

    I'd love to get it working so that I can get rid of my Venu.

  • 0 over 3 years ago

    Updates on new things I've tried:

    • Tried a "factory master reset" and the Instinct still has the same body battery problem (always shows huge 'stress')
    • alas, old versions of the instinct solar don't seem to exist on the garmin website, so I can't try reverting to the 14.00 version that a redditor said was working for them.
    • I tried updating to the current 16.41 beta and the problem still exists.

    Can anyone here confirm that 16.00 is working with body battery for them on their instinct solar? (i.e. so I can figure out if something is possibly busted with my device?  Thanks much!

  • 0 over 3 years ago in reply to WD

    interesting.  yeah - my Venu body battery works great.  Supposedly according to a redditor his Instinct Solar with 14.00 firmware works great.  Perhaps something is busted since then with newer firmwares?

  • 0 over 3 years ago in reply to punkgeek

    I restarted my Instinct Solar and now both the Stress and the Body Battery is working fine.  I have not paid much attention to this for many months, but recently noticed that my watch was not showing any information for this at all.  Even a manual stress test showed the message 'Too active to measure' even though I was resting my arm on the table.

    This is the first time that I restarted my watch in many months and I assume that it got confused after so many automatic OS updates.

  • 0 over 3 years ago in reply to Jacques

    ooh interesting!  would you mind posting what your firmware version is? (in settings / about)

  • 0 over 3 years ago in reply to punkgeek

    Software version 16.00  (2175e57)

    It is an Instinct Solar.

    I was wondering why mine didn't work at all and then I found this posting of yours and decided to restart my watch.  It worked the first time and now I have both battery and stress values. 

  • 0 over 3 years ago in reply to Jacques

    alas - mine was 16.00 also.  yeah, I've rebooted many times with no success in my case.

  • 0 over 3 years ago in reply to punkgeek

    I assume that you also cleaned your sensors.  If it still has a guarantee, perhaps you can get it replaced?

  • 0 over 3 years ago in reply to punkgeek

    I'm on Solar Instinct with 16.00 firmware and body battery works fine. Every morning I wake up with 90-100% and drain it down to 10-30% by the time I go to bed (depending on intensity and duration of my runs and workouts)