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Garmin 820 Sporadic Battery Life

I have seen many complaints about the battery life on the 820, but my concern is that the battery life on my 820 is very inconsistent. It is never as good as advertised, but I assume the 11 hour life is with the screen off, no sensors, and gps off while riding indoors. This is not how I use my devices.

I rode 60 miles while using navigation with the screen in the sleep mode, or as I call it the "asleep at the wheel mode" because it often forgets to notify me that I am supposed to turn. I would like to be able to see my speed, cadence, and elapsed time, but I have to chose between navigation or seeing the screen in order to get a full ride out of the 820. This ride was about 5:15 long and I finished with my battery at 60%. I was impressed with the battery life, but don't trust this device enough to attempt a ride this long with the screen on.

One week later (last weekend) I rode the same route in the opposite direction. 2.5 hours into the ride I get a message stating that my battery is low. It was at 100% when I started. This is not the first time that I have had such short battery life. Also during this ride I was getting the turn in 0.1 mile prompt about 100 yards before a turn. After each turn the prompt would remain on the screen for miles. The only way to get the screen to go to sleep was to stop, remove my glove, and touch the prompt to dismiss it.

Are other users having sporadic battery life like this? Has anyone else seen this problem with messages not going away? Is there a comparable edge device with better battery life that will allow me to ride with my screen on?

FYI: software is 10.0.0. I bought this unit shortly after it was released, so I have had it for a couple of years.
  • Hi all, yesterday I had the worst battery duration so far. Just under 3 hours from full charge. It's been poor for the whole winter, but I thought the reason was cold weather. But not yesterday, with 15° C. I have the incident detection feature triggered very often, so I've tried to disable it. I've disabled also group tracking. Retroilluminaton set to 15 sec. Screen bright to auto. Well, after 5 hours the battery was still at 41%.... Could someone confirm better duration with those settings, please?
  • The battery life since version 11.00 is bad. I did several tests and here is the result.
    Note that the setting of the screen is as follows: Standby 15s, High Sensitivity, Auto Color.

    Good day:
    - Activity on 2x40mn home trainer, GPS off, 1s recording, bluetooth connected phone, 11% battery used.
    - Cycling activity of 1h10, GPS + Glonass, recording 1s, phone not connected in bluetooth, 13% of battery used.
    - 2h bike activity, GPS + Glonass, 1s recording, bluetooth connected phone, 25% battery used.

    And F ..... days:
    - Cycling activity of 2h50mn, GPS + Galileo, 1s recording, bluetooth connected phone, 60% battery used.
    - Cycling activity of 3h10mn, GPS + Galileo, recording 1s, bluetooth connected phone, 84% of battery used.
    - MTB activity of 3h20mn, GPS + Glonass, Guidance, intelligent recording, Bluetooth connected phone, 75% of battery used.

    I do not dare to even go out more than 4h with guidance.

    Another strange thing today I come back from an activity and the edge820 showed me 11% of remaining battery (phew I came back so much ....) I plug it and it jumps to 25% ... WTF?
  • ^^^ I'm not sure you can tell whether it's the battery life that is sporadic or it's the battery life indication that's sporadic. The indication may be sporadic rather than actual battery life.
  • In any case I can say one thing the autonomy of my garmin Edge 820 is bad ;)
  • I've been noticing sporadic battery usage since starting back up commuting. The last few weeks I've watched it. My round trip commute is about 1.5 hours I've on average seen a 26% battery drain (74% remaining) per 1.5 hour cycle. Two of the days the battery usage was 57% for the exact same 1.5 hour ride.

    My first unit purchased when they were first made available was warrantied for the screen halo. My warranty unit is now showing the halo after 6 months. But because it is a warranty unit it falls under the original units warranty so I'm out of luck.
  • My battery is also draining to fast!
  • Mine is less than 10%/H with power meter, hr, varia radar, Speed and cadence sensors
    FW 11.00
  • The real issue I was trying to point out was that I had to dismiss the turn prompts. This has never happened in the past. It was only giving me the first prompt at .1 mile and the prompt would not show for turning in 500 feet. Sometimes I would be well past the turn and I would stop and dismiss the prompt and then 30 seconds later it say something stupid like turn in 13ft even though I had already made the turn.


    I've been experiencing a very similar issue with my 820 turn prompts for quite a while. Are you still having this issue? Mine also stay on the screen for an absurd length of time after the turn. This is a big issue if there is another turn coming up and the unit is stuck on the previous turn. This is the first time I've seen someone else mention a similar issue..
  • if you ride mtb race for 5-6 hours where you need the screen open all time because you need to se the course. thats a big problem. smiling