I'm having a new Garmin Instinct Solar (tactical) for about 3 weeks now.
Garmin advertises with having about 24 days of battery life in smartwatch mode (without solar charging). So whats defined with smartwatch mode exactly?
Because I've configured my new watch as energy sufficient as possible:
- reduced brightness from 20 to 10%
- turned off backlight gestures
- turned off PulseOX
It seems the battery was dropping already quite fast when configuring the watch and the last 10% went to 0% in only 1 hour (no GPS), but then ofcourse backlight is constantly on whenever you press a button. So that's not quite a fair comparison of to the expected batterylife. So I've decided to make a test and record once a day at 00:00 how manny days and the % of the battery is left. I know that "days" is probably calculated and therefore an estimation. So the recorded % will give the best insight.
I've charged the watch to 100% (19:00) and started measuring on daily base on 00:00. I started with 99%, so it only used 1% in a timespan of 5 hours, which looked promising so far.
The things that were activated during test were the HeartRate sensor and it was connected to my mobile phone, it was also recording my steps en stairs taken etc. And I consider these 3 things together as the basic smartwatch mode as advertised with.
I was not using GPS during the entire testperiode, because this ofcourse drains much more energy and makes the final test results less fair and consistent. I was only watching the time during test period. So now and then recieved some messages from my connected phone and sometimes needed to activate the backlight for propper view of the time in dark enveironment. So doing only this in a constant manner should give me verry usefull testresults during the entire test I think.
btw, automatic keylock is activated, so it was not possible to accidentally activate GPS or whatsoever..
My test is not complete at the time of writing, since I still have 17% of battery left now. But this are my results so far:
The yellow fields show some measurements in between the daily measure points, because % was drastically dropping there, without actually something with the watch. But energy was dropping there with 8% / 10% a day.
So now I'm ony 15 days (and a bit) away of a full charge in what I believe "smartwatchmode". And my battery already reached 17%. It now says 5 days left. But like mentioned before, the previous time the last 10% was dissapeared in about 1 hour.
I'm just having this watch about 3 weeks now, and also contacted Garmin about this. They tell me to send in the watch so the battery will be checked. But this is not giving me much trust.
Because in a previous in previous correspondation I've asked how to best check the battery drain. And then they explained me that they put the watch in GPS activity and time it for 30min. And then watch how much % are used. But when looking at the tabel, battery drainage is not consistent. At some spots it drains 3% a day while on other days it drains 10% in completely the same circumstances.
So it's also going to be where they will start the 30 min test. And this is most probably going to give more "normall" results close to the 100%, then at the 17% where I'm now.
So this actually leaves me with frustration going to send in the watch for testing, not knowing how they will test or interpret the results because it will be another test as I'm doing now. And my results show that I'm far behind of the advertised 24 days (when even had days with a lot of days and so also had a bit of solar charge).
