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Battery Life

Got my Athlete on Thursday and charged it to 100% straight away. After 3.5hrs of non-GPS activities without music and a lot of playing around with it by yesterday (Monday) it was down to 8% so I started a 'pretend' GPS activity to let it run down to zero. I then charged it up to 100% and left it charging for another hour - so hopefully it would have had a good chance to calibrate between 0% and 100%.

It's now 24 hours on and with no activities and just normal usage, it's dropped 14% so I'd predict a battery life of 7 days - less than what I came to expect with my f5+. Of course the battery indicator might still be as vague as the f5+ and maybe I will still get closer to the promised 12 days out of it, but what's other people's experience so far over the first few days of ownership?

Neil
  • Anyone else got any feedback on this yet? I’m 3 cycles in and seeing 0.7%/hour battery drain in daily/nightly use (non-GPS activities don’t seem to draw much extra), which is about 17%/day or about 6 days usage (this is based on indicated battery strength and one real full-charge to empty cycle).

    The only difference in setup compared to my f5+ which regularly gave me over 10 days non-GPS use is that I’ve got PulseOx enabled. I’m now running the current beta but that doesn’t seem to have made any difference.
  • I quickly realised that pulse Ox spanks the battery, so I turned it off. I posted on another thread a day or two back, but I'm finding approx 0.6% per hour with the default MARQ Athlete watch face and 0.5% per hour with a stock digital face.
  • Thanks, I’ll try to turn off PulseOX as it’s not a metric I need for anything. I do like to use everything I’ve paid for, but if it’s a compromise between that and battery life then so be it.
  • To be honest, the Pulse Ox is a feature I'm happy to have, for use as and when I get the opportunity to do some outdoor activities at a high altitude location; particularly to measure how I'm acclimatising during sleep hours. The rest of the time I'm really not sure it adds any value for the cost to battery life (other than it's a number that's cool to talk about down at the pub).
  • Disabled Pulse Ox and over the last 24hrs I’ve averaged 0.4%/hr (and that included an hour of indoor cycling with multiple ANT+ connections). Much happier with that and, as you say, Pulse Ox functionality is still there as and when I need it.

    Neil
  • A bit worried about the battery life. Received my Athlete yesterday, finished charging it to 100% at around 13:00, did a 1 hour run with GPS+Galileo and Spotify later in the day and am now at 72%, 19 hours later.

    Admittedly it is the first charge, and may perhaps get better after a couple of cycles, but we'll see. I was hoping I'd only have to charge it once a week (3-4 runs at 1 hour with GPS&Spotify). My Fenix 5X+ sits comfortably at around 50-60% with this usage after 1 week.
  • From the official Garmin specs on their website “GPS with music: Up to 9 hours” which means expect at best 11% drain per hour, with the most power efficient activity settings (like GPS only and no LiveTrack). My experience so far is that with GPS+Galileo and sensors attached, recording an activity plus music is a bit more than 11%. Add to that the default MARQ watch face runs at about 0.6% per hour (as opposed to 0.4-0.5% for a basic digital watch face) and your 19 hours consumes another 11-12%. If you have Pulse Ox on it will burn considerably more in smart watch mode. So that means the best one could expect from what you described (assuming no Pulse Ox) is 77% left (100% minus 11% for 1hr GPS+Music minus a further 12% for 19hrs in smart watch). So given you had GPS+Galileo and you likely have some backlight usage and other power consuming settings, then your 72% does not seem unusual or excessively low.

    What would be worth you testing for comparison, is running the hour GPS activity with GPS but no music; my experience is that music drains battery more by itself than GPS by itself does on the MARQ. This is different to my observations on the Fenix 5+, where music seemed to drain the same as GPS.

    Also worth noting that the 5X+ has considerably more battery life than the 5+ and the MARQ. So far, I’m finding my MARQ is similar in battery life to my 5+. By comparison the 5X+ specs have “GPS and Music: Up to 13 hours” and “Smartwatch: Up to 20 days” vs the MARQ’s 9 hours and 12 days respectively; so you should expect to get just under 2/3 of the battery life out of the MARQ than you did on the 5X+
  • From the official Garmin specs on their website “GPS with music: Up to 9 hours” which means expect at best 11% drain per hour, with the most power efficient activity settings (like GPS only and no LiveTrack). My experience so far is that with GPS+Galileo and sensors attached, recording an activity plus music is a bit more than 11%. Add to that the default MARQ watch face runs at about 0.6% per hour (as opposed to 0.4-0.5% for a basic digital watch face) and your 19 hours consumes another 11-12%. If you have Pulse Ox on it will burn considerably more in smart watch mode. So that means the best one could expect from what you described (assuming no Pulse Ox) is 77% left (100% minus 11% for 1hr GPS+Music minus a further 12% for 19hrs in smart watch). So given you had GPS+Galileo and you likely have some backlight usage and other power consuming settings, then your 72% does not seem unusual or excessively low.

    What would be worth you testing for comparison, is running the hour GPS activity with GPS but no music; my experience is that music drains battery more by itself than GPS by itself does on the MARQ. This is different to my observations on the Fenix 5+, where music seemed to drain the same as GPS.

    Also worth noting that the 5X+ has considerably more battery life than the 5+ and the MARQ. So far, I’m finding my MARQ is similar in battery life to my 5+. By comparison the 5X+ specs have “GPS and Music: Up to 13 hours” and “Smartwatch: Up to 20 days” vs the MARQ’s 9 hours and 12 days respectively; so you should expect to get just under 2/3 of the battery life out of the MARQ than you did on the 5X+


    I've turned off Pulse Ox as I don't see the point in those metrics.
    So 56 hours later and another 30min run with GPS+Galileo, Spotify, HRM Run and Stryd and I'm down to 45%. So going by the math, 56*0,6 + 1.5*11 = 50,1 which isn't far from what I'm experiencing.

    There's 168 hours in a week, 168*0,6 = 100,8. There's obviously no chance of squeezing 1 week out of this watch. In smart watch mode it's supposed to last up to 12 days, but that's perhaps without 24/7 OHR and one of the digital watch faces with no regular updates on the screen?

    If only you could toggle off the second dial and swap out the display of heart rate for something more static on the stock MARQ watch face.. *cough* Garmin-Heath *cough*
  • Well with PulseOX off, stock watchface, only non-GPS activities (with ANT+ connections) and no music I’m still seeing an average indicated draw of 0.4%/hr = approx 10.5 days. Since disabling PulseOX I’ve not been in a position to let the battery drain to 0 to check how accurate the figure really is (and obviously would normally be charging before then anyway), but it would seem that I can expect to be able to comfortably go for well over a week between charges (without GPS workouts) which I’m happy with.
  • There is definitely something off with the display of the battery percentage. Charged the watch from ~40% to 96% this morning and it has been stuck at 96% all day. Just did a restart and it went up to 100%.