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short battery life (10 hours) - potential impact of ant+ sensors?

I am intensively using my Edge 530. GPS+Glonas, 1 sec recording. I noticed that when I ride with my buddies despite we both start off with 100% charge after a few hours I have much lower %. I.e. 50% after 5 hours on my edge and 70% on my friends unit. We seem to have the same settings, using the same routing track. The main difference is that probably I have sensors for other bikes / trainer / virb camera setup and he doesnt. Can this be the reason for the battery drain? Or should I look for another reason?

  • The Edge stops looking for sensors 2 minutes after the timer is started so that is not likely to be the cause.

    I would check the display settings to see what the brightness is set to and the backlight timeout

  • Brightness set to auto, timeout set to stays on. You may have a point there although I thought autobrightness turns off the light during the day?

  • Are you running any CIQ apps or data fields?

  • I changed the backlight to 15 seconds but still auto.
    I am running My Edge 2 cycling data fields. 

  • Most of the regular sensors (power, HR, speed/cadence) are very low power drain. However the Varia radar definitely has a significant power hit to the head unit(probably from the rated 20 hours down to 16 hours). Not sure what the Virb does here (although probably not much if not connected).

    I note the MyEdge 2 datafield includes significant graphical elements to it. Constantly re-rendering graphical elements on the display is processor (and therefore battery) intensive when compared with the native text datafields. If your buddy is not running this screen, this may well account for the difference. But if you are only getting down to 50% at the end of a 5 hour ride, I'd just leave it as is.

  • Using the map screen uses more battery.  If you had the map screen displayed more then that would account for some of the difference.