Okay, I have a standard 1040, not the solar model. Up until yesterday's ride, the battery seemed perfectly fine. 2-3 hours on a ride, degraded the battery to about 94-97%, longer rides would degrade it a little further. One five hour ride left me with about 91 or 92%, which is in-line with the predicted 43 hours of total battery life. When I say "predicted" I'm not talking about Garmin's published specs, but what the device predicts I will get when I press on the little battery icon, which is obviously based upon my chosen settings.
But yesterday, without any warning, it all went to total crap! I was on a moderately long ride, totaling about 5 hours. I noticed about 2 hours in that the battery life on the front screen was 67%, which is insane! I have "Battery Life" as one of the fields on my main screen. So I double-checked by swiping down and got to the page with the battery icon on it, and sure enough, it was also 67%. From there it was pretty much all downhill. By the time I was done with a measly 5ish hour ride, I had 39% Battery life left, and the predicted hours was something like 15 hours, if I remember correctly.
Honestly, that's a kind of battery life that my Edge 1000 would laugh at!
Now before anyone asks what my settings are, please remember that I am NOT expecting the 100 advertised hours from my 1040. I am aware that my settings bring my predicted battery life, when fully charged (100%) down to about 43 hours. If you need to know, though, I have the screen set NOT to turn the backlight off. I use the highest GPS settings, which is GPS+ (which includes Glonass, which I know is a battery drain). I use this GPS setting because I live in NY City, and any time I am anywhere near tall buildings, I have intermittent spotty GPS, presumably based on being in a sort of skyscraper-well. The screen brightness is set to "Auto". So as I said, not expecting 100 hours.
Now I am also wondering if yesterday's battery issue was some kind of an arbitration or one-off, so I will try it again today and see what happens. I did find it odd that at the beginning of my ride, yesterday, the device predicted the expected 43 hours, but as the accelerated battery life degradation proceeded, the device remained consistent in the expected battery life for the percentage left. So, it took about 2.5 hours to go from 67% to 39%, but when it as 67% the device was saying I had about 31 hours left, but 2.5 hours later, at 39%, it was saying I had about 15 hours. So I went through supposedly 30 hours of battery life in about 5 hours.
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Another problem I had yesterday was that my elevation fluctuated between like -160 and -145 feet for the entire ride. This is impossible, since NY City is a coastal city, and I am always very close to water level. LMAO at one point I was riding along bike path along a waterway and I was probably about 3 feet above sea level, but somehow the 1040 thought I was -150 feet, which is physically impossible. However, this I may have resolved when I got home and I manually forced the device to calibrate from my second floor bedroom, and it showed the expected +30 feet.
Another problem is with cell phone functionality, particularly alerts and weather. The phone was connected to the Garminm and yet the weather page thought there was no connection, and was telling me as much. I tried "forgetting" my phone on the Garmin and "forgetting" my Garmin on the phone and re-synced everything. This didn't work. I also force shut off both the phone and the 1040, which also didn't work. After all of this, though, I was able to get a very poor weather screen with almost no stats by opening the Garmin Connect app on my phone. All it told me was what the temperature was (which was wrong) and had no info on wind or predictions for the coming hours.
I got disgusted yesterday, early in my ride, seeing very limited weather info, so while pedaling, I shut the 1040 off (Garmin Connect open and running on my phone), which was difficult since the unit doesn't want to let you while an activity is running. But I held the On/off button, while pedaling for 10 seconds, which forced it to shut off, and I immediately turned it back on. After all this, the weather was fine, with the "coming hours" predicted below the current weather, and all the right stats working properly.
