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Garmin Instinct Solar battery life and battery life estimator questions

4835186
over 3 years ago

Sorry if this ends up rambling, but I'm curious about a few things regarding the battery life and the estimator feature on my Instinct Solar.

I've had it for a couple of months now, and have noticed that the widget that estimates how many days of battery life I have left is overestimating the life. It goes down about 1.5-2 days for every 24 hours I use the watch, even when using Battery Saver mode overnight. I wonder if it gives the life assuming it will be exposed to a certain amount of sunlight? (I spend most of my days inside, where its not exposed to sunlight any meaningful amount of time)

For example, I took it off the charger last night at 100% at 10 pm. It showed 27 days of life left. This morning at 10 am, it dropped to 26 days. Currently, at 2 pm, it dropped again to 25 days, and is at 95%. Some napkin math shows at this rate, the battery will last 15 days, almost half of the original 27 day estimate.

Its set to go into battery saver mode at night, and this morning (at 10 am, when I noticed it had dropped to 26 days) I changed the watch face to one that does not refresh every second, but it is still draining faster than expected.

I understand that battery estimators aren't totally accurate, but I was wondering if this is normal, and I should just adapt to it, or if I'm really not getting the battery life I'm supposed to be.

  • 0 over 3 years ago

    I would like to add that I have a similar question - how long realistically does the battery last on an Instinct Solar. I am running version 16.0 firmware - reset the watch to factory default settings then chose to have updates and notifications from my iPhone X - plus generally speaking I don't go outdoors much and if I do I'm in the UK Winter right now. Based on that information - how long 'in reality' does the battery last for - seems like only 5 days to me which defeats the point of having a device like this.

    It's important we all know the answer to this - it's certainly not the 'enduring' battery life I was looking for.

  • +1 over 3 years ago

    Here are the Battery Life specifications for the Instinct Solar: 

    - Instinct Solar Specs

    The battery prediction software will change and quite often taking into consideration all impacting factors.

  • 0 over 3 years ago in reply to cdgeorge

    I've had my Instinct Solar since August 20 and would comment as follows (Note I always have HRM & PulseOx on)
    - With a constant Bluetooth connection to smart phone I would achieve approx 6 - 7 days life (100 > 10%), excluding any activity usage.
    - With BT off I can achieve ~13 days life, excluding any activity usage,
    - With BT off (save for sync), 1.5hr Cardio (GPS off) and ~3hr hike (GPS on) I can achieve ~10 days life.

    This is all based on no solar charging. In the summer this is extended (especially when hiking, etc).

  • 0 over 3 years ago

    Sounds like the battery saver might be confusing it; Have you tried without it on?

  • 0 over 3 years ago

    My watch has started doing the same, although idk if that's a change or if I didn't notice it to start with 

  • 0 over 3 years ago 
    My watch is barely BT-enabled with 14 days smartwatch mode.
I don't know where the producer takes these 28 days from? :/
  • 0 over 3 years ago in reply to 4913021

    thats about what it tells me (it cuts the time in half if its oxygen sat turned on) although I feel like even with that turned off and the backlight turned to 5%, I'm maybe getting 21 days including 7 hours of non-gps activity or so?

  • 0 over 2 years ago

    I have yet to see the "Solar" part of the watch name live up to it's claim. Whenever I'm at sporting events, mowing the lawn, walking around outside, the battery meter rarely if ever shows any solar activity. I know cloudy days won't really work well but I'm talking bright, sunny days. All the charging mine gets is from plugging it in and it has never gotten what it claims it will get. The suggestions to turn off this or turn off that are crazy. Why even put these features on the watch if it can barely support them? I bought this because I had lost my Vivoactive HR watch, which is found months alter. My Vivoactive HR I expected to have to charge it fairly regularly, usually every day or two, but it seemed like that one had a better battery time given what it claimed, and at much less the price. I love this watch but the Solar aspect and battery life will keep from ever buying one of these again and it will make me hesitant from buying another Garmin watch.

  • 0 over 2 years ago in reply to armytruckersgt

    It comes down to how your watch is being used.

    My experience has been the opposite. If I put my Instinct Solar (first Gen or 2nd Gen Instinct 2 Solar) in the window 3-4 hours per day on Battery Saver mode, my battery will charge to the point that the remaining battery life is infinite.

    It strictly depends on how you are use your watch. If you are using GPS a lot, have long backlight times set, receive dozens of smart notifications daily, etc - it will all add up but it will not be an obvious difference to a solar charge but it is there.

  • 0 over 2 years ago in reply to Garmin - Chris

    I have been in all sorts of situations where I was not using anything but the watch for time and it was not getting one bit of a charge from the sun. I've had it go dead while outside. The little meter that is supposed to track solar intensity, barely registers on the sunniest of days. I've had a Garmin solar charged watch before and it worked well. I based my choice of this one off of that watch's performance.