Poor battery life (less than 4.5hrs) and unreliable sensor connections

no, we are answering for stupid things, spending time from our lifes

return that damn thing if you dont know how to use it, or if you dont like it , or if is has warranty problem( witch I doubt) 

god damn it , my non solar version battery last for 2 weeks, around 3 hours 4% battery 

Absolutely no offense, but can someone explain me what is the point in putting brightness to 100%? That's one of the things I love in the garmin that in bright sunlight I can set it to 0% and I still clearly see everything...on the opposite side, when it gets darker I need to set it on a higher level (well, the automatic brightness feature does the trick to me).

One of the reasons I returned back to the edge from Karoo2 that in bright sunlight sometimes I wasn't able to read its screen even at 100% brightness. I don't know the technical details, but for me it seems that the edge display works in a total opposite way then a standard phone's display.

Additional details in case it helps:

Strava route was enabled and active.

ClimbPro was working as expected.

I was not viewing the map during my ride. 

The screen is set to auto brightness. 

If the battery is defective and the software is working correctly, I would expect the software to see a high rate of discharge/diminished capacity and show a corresponding short expected remaining duration. Stated another way, the capacity of the battery and the ability of the software to estimate rate of discharge (and turn that into minutes/hours) should be decoupled.

I am definitely experiencing an issue with how the software calculates and reports the rate of discharge.

Whether there is also a software bug negatively impacting the rate of discharge, or if there is a hardware battery defect is unclear.

Have I reached out to Garmin? Yes, I have.

Did you tried:

-use different activity profile?

-change the settings for GPS from multi to onlu GPS, disable auto brightness etc

-when you start the ride , hoe many hours do you have battery estimation?

-did you reset your device to defaults?

To answer the 100% brightness question. I was out one time and had to rely on the map to get back to where I was staying. The sun was extremely bright (Spain) and I couldn’t see the map with the “auto” setting. I had to keep stopping, remove the sun-glasses, to check the route. I subsequently turned on the 100% display.

This mode is however a total battery killer. This was on my 1000, which normally had about 10hrs, with this mode set it cut it in half, i.e. 5hrs. So it is not a mode to use as standard, unless you do short rides and recharge every time.

On my 1040 I have “auto” set and find the screen always readable for the data fields due to the size of the font. However, the other day I looked down at the map and it was not readable. I was at home, so it didn’t matter, but out where you are following an unknown route it would have been a problem. I would not do anything with the 1040, as it does auto change the brightness and I think I would not have had the same problem as in Spain. (That is however not proven.)  But if you are following a route and not just the map, I am sure the “turns” info would have been adequate to find the way with the “auto” setting. 

Due to reflective display, sometimes in shadow environment, display is not alwasys visible, but you can turn text notification (not map) and you dont have to keep eyes on the display, in fact the speaker is more loud than 1030 and you can hear very well 

The symptoms you describe are very similar to a failing battery. I’ve seen the same characteristics when a battery is end of life. The fast rate of discharge, inaccurate power % and being at 30% and then it fails.  I’d say it’s very highly likely you’ve been unlucky and got a bad battery. Not easy for the manufacturer to check and even harder for Garmin unless they ran a charge / discharge test on every battery.  That would be expensive and time consuming.  

Your best answer here as a lot have suggested is return the unit for another.  We certainly can’t diagnose it as a lot of others have said the battery life is 40 hours + with everything on. 

This was yesterday. Screen on time was around 8:50h. Brightness Auto. LiveTrack enabled. PowerMeter, Radar, Speed Sensor, HRM and Multiband GPS. Acitve navigation and Map view the whole time. 

21% Battery Usage.

How did you get this graph? I had it on my 1030+, but now I don’t on the 1040 and can’t figure out the reason…is it a CIQ app?