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Varia UT800 Headlight Problem

Just got the UT800 and paired it to my Edge1000. I took it for a 25km test ride and have experienced 6 disconnections from the Edge. It re-connected 3 times a minute or two later but it failed the other times. What is disconcerting is that the light remained off during the failed re-connections. I had to power it back on to re-connect to the Edge.

Anyone else?. This never happened with the HL500.

Edge firmware at 14.10 & UT800 firmware at 2.10. Also connected at the time was: Garmin RTL500, Wahoo Tickr, Stages power meter & Garmin speed sensor. Bluetooth off.
  • I actually have a problem where the UT-800 goes into night mode when in daylight. Seems to always remain in night mode for me at night with my Edge 1000. Had another disconnect yesterday on my commute as well. Fortunately it was daylight though. I agree though. Massive safety concern here. I sometimes descend a 1400ft hill at night. If I were to lose my headlight, that could be disastrous. Garmin should just issue a recall here until they can fix the firmware.
  • I just bought a UT800 today (v2.10) and same problem. After about an hour of riding it disconnected from my Edge 1000 (14.10) and turned itself off. That's really a bad safety issue - IMHO - since I plan to use this for winter riding after dusk.

    After a minute or so it connected again and my Edge prompted me to enable it on the light network (I also have a Varia Radar).

    This is unacceptable. If it does it again on on the next few rides I will take it back to my dealer for a refund and use something else.
  • My experience on yesterday's ride:
    • 18 minutes into the ride, I saw a "headlight disconnected" message on my Edge 1000 and my UT800 went from flash to steady mode.
    • I waited for it to re-connect until 24 minutes into the ride, but it did not and it stayed in steady mode.
    • I went into the settings menu and disabled and then re-enabled the UT800. There was no change in the light behavior nor did it re-connect.
    • I deleted the UT800 from the Edge 1000 and then selected "add sensor".
    • The Edge 1000 searched for about 2 minutes, but did not find the UT800.
    • I turned the UT800 off and then back on, so that the LED was blinking purple and selected "add sensor" again.
    • Again, the Edge1000 did not find the light after 2 minutes of searching.
    • I then put the UT800 into manual flash mode until I could find a place to pull off the road. It stayed in that mode, without incident for approximately the next ten minutes.
    • I then turned off the UT800 and turned off the Edge 1000 using the power button. The Edge 1000 froze with the I/O icon on the screen for approximately 2 minutes.
    • I reset the Edge 1000 by pressing and holding the power button until the Garmin logo appeared.
    • I then turned on the UT800, placed it into pairing mode, paired the UT800 with the Edge 1000.
    • Upon restarting my ride, the UT800 operated normally for the next 45 minutes until the end of the ride. The Varia Radar operated normally the entire ride.
    • Upon completing the ride, both the UT800 and the Varia Radar shut down normally.
  • My failures seem to different from ride to ride. Today, I got " headlight disconnected" and "do you want to enable headlight?" messages at 1 hour 34 minutes, 2 hours 17 minutes, and 2 hours 37 minutes into a 4.5 hour ride. The UT800 stayed flashing the entire time. Very random . . .
  • Lots of disconnects in the past couple of days. Have been screenshotting the UT-800 disconnects when they happen.
  • Yes, those screenshots show the same disconnect message I routinely get with the Edge 1000.
  • Seems definitely related to running the Varia Radar. Running the UT-800 only seems to not disconnect.
  • I am having the same issue. The first time I thought it was a fluke. Just yesterday, my Garmin seemed to freeze up when forming the network. I had to reset my edge 1000 and it would not turn on the light but recognized my varia radar. I manually turned on the ut800 and continued riding. After about 10 minutes I kept seeing messages about forming the light network or disconnecting. Then suddenly my headlight turned off. It could have been very dangerous if I hadn't been with a couple others with lights. I have also noticed that it doesn't do a great job of recognizing when the sun comes up. My light has on several occasions stayed on full brightness and almost drained after an hour and a half ride even though only 30 minutes of the ride is dark enough for a light.

    I had thought it was my edge device because on many occasions I have had to reconnect my other sensors for no reason starting a ride. Not sure what is going on but I agree that I have too much vested to have a product behave this way. I have all garmin products (radar, headlight, speed/cadence sensor, heart rate) except for quarq power meter. You would think they would get along better than what I have been seeing lately.
  • Definitely Varia Radar + UT-800 related. The UT-800 hasn't disconnected once since I started using it without the Varia Radar.

    This was a screen shot of my last disconnect using the UT-800 + Varia Radar from last week. Haven't seen a disconnect since I started using only using the UT-800 without the Varia Radar.

    Garmin should really recall the UT-800 or issue a firmware update to not turn off the light upon disconnect ASAP. This is a super, insanely dangerous bug. I could have easily crashed if I lost my headlight descending Claremont Avenue in Berkeley right after I received the light. Fortunately, I only used the unit once in that scenario (a descent with no street lights at night) and it didn't disconnect on that ride.

    I moved back to using a Light & Motion 850 for any rides where a light is absolutely critical. I'm basically using the UT-800 on commutes only, and, TBH, it's not super great there either. I had to reboot mine on Monday before it would connect to my Edge 1000. Also, the daylight mode isn't super reliable. It seems to randomly switch back to low beam for some reason. It'd much safer if the light were continuously in flash mode during daylight hours in automatic mode. Probably the UT-800 should just use the sunrise/sunset times on the Edge 1000 and switch to flash mode an hour after sunrise and an hour before sunset, then go to the ambient sensor outside of those hours since the ambient sensor doesn't appear to be reliable despite using a brand new Edge unit.ciq.forums.garmin.com/.../1244366.png