Actual Battery Life

Brightness of the screen setup please?

I just did a 200 miler on Saturday with 18500ft of ascent. c20 degrees temp. Fully charged Garmin Edge 530 with the latest firmware. 1 second GPS recording. GPS and Glonass on, but not Galileo.

I had my ANT+ HRM and 4iii Power Meter hooked up, full routing navigation running with turn by turn directions, linked by Bluetooth to my 'phone, auto brightness on and kept the 530 switched on for virtually the whole day. 15 hours 24 minutes including stops but still switched on.

The 530 still had 21% juice left. Fantastic!

As a test, I also took along my old 820 which I also had running. The 820 however was not hooked up to my power meter, only my HRM. It had battery save mode on, no navigation running, yet it died after 11 and a bit hours.

I detested my 820 almost from the outset. I toyed with getting the 830 but decided on buttons being better and more reliable. They are great and it doesn't feel like a backwards step. In all respects, the new 530 is so much better. Bigger, much brighter and high res screen. Excellent.

Following my last post re: the 200 miler, I forgot to say that Climb Pro, food and drink alerts were all turned on too, as were the maps turned on to pop up on approaches to junctions rather than just the turn by turn text.

Does anyone know the actual spec of the battery, or the extra battery pack? Its V, mAh and A? also what are the charger requirements?

It's very good; 20hrs seems a reasonable claim based on my experience. They have finally produced a device with battery life comparable to the Edge 500!

I need this answer too. Planing a multi day ride RAGBRAI with several other devices that need charging. I need to plan out how many bricks I need to charge them all. Why is this info so hard to find?  I know my garmin 530 will run all day but what about recharging in the field?  Being secretive is not helpful. 

Run time will be variable depending on configuration and age of the battery.

Mine is 6 months old and had 70% left after 11 hours with Bluetooth on, 10% backlight always on, ANT+ HRM connected, GPS+Glonass and WiFi off.

You can recharge on the go from a USB source while an activity is being recorded without any problem, although backlight may jump to 100% on the first plug-in, but once changed back to 10% it will stay that way even if external power is lost and found again. The above settings draw about 25-30mA from a USB source when the internal battery is fully charged.

I think the backlight uses quite a lot of battery, but i always had mine turned off during daytime rides and only 10-20% for dark rides. My eyes aren't great but i never felt the need to have a backlight on during daytime. With TBT instructions i didn't feel the need to have the map screen on too much as i understand that this uses more battery. Another thing i would do would be to turn of unused sensors so that the unit isn't looking for them. Not sure if this is significant. With all that i would be confident of getting near 20h.

I had fully charged, and after 3hrs, left 78% of battery. I was using HR, cadence and speed sensor.  During ride I was using  navigation, map was always showed. so my estimation are up 11 hrs, should be sufficient