Battery Life Getting Worse

Yes, since 5.50 upgrade. Garmin says to be aware, but so far no action (this is almost taking a year now!!). Battery life more than 50% reduced compared to 5.50. Unacceptable! Garmin, pls take your responsibility now. The minimum you can do is revert back to 5.40 (battery life is more important than all other updates!), and give people in the future a choice to update or not.

Same here although I'm not convinced mine is update related. Up until about 10 days ago my normal battery life was 4 - 5 days. I'm not aware of an update around that time but since then I am currently needing to recharge everyday.

I charged last night, have to have GPS off, phone connection off just to get through the day, and I've used 80% of battery life in 24 hours. I've changed to stock watch face, hard reset before and after charge (every time) but all to no avail. Something is sucking battery life at a great rate and I have no idea what. luckily I still have my good old Vivoactive HR that gives me 10 days easily. Sometimes upgrades aren't apparently.

Could be the GPS updates that have been pushed out. I don't use the GPS often but the updates could be pulling power to the GPS in the background. Not sure why you would need that to happen though. Whatever the reason, something is draining the stew out of my battery. 45% in 12 hours and I've yet to hit the treadmill.

In many cases the culprit of the sudden high battery consumption, is the installed "custom" watch face which is not prepared/working well after the firmware upgrade.
Try reverting to the standard watchface and see how your battery life is.

So battery power comes up again, I will do the hard reset once more, use default watch face etc but I have done all this before ...

what i have noticed though is under settings that gps has gone, anyone else seen this ?

No GPS in settings.
And I've minimized the number of watch faces on my VA3 with the only 3rd Party being Wf4CoolSolid that gets updated regularly when Garmin updates its system.
I don't expect the advertised "up to 7 days" of battery life that Garmin boasts. But I would like to see 5 days pass before I have to find a charger.

Sorely tempted to move to Fitbit but with the VA3, VivoSmart HR+ and the smart scale I have a small investment in the Garmin ecosystem. Shame Garmin doesn't recognize that consumers like their products but they need to step it up with the software development and support to retain those customers.

All devices from all brands have issues. Pick the issues that are important and find the brand that have the best reputation for those issues. My wife uses a Fitbit Versa that kind of works for her but would not work for me. My VA3 would not be a good choice for her. The consumer wants a lot of functions that don't lend themselves to a wrist based monitor. To get folks to but their products, the manufacturers give the consumer what they want even if it isn't exactly what they expect. Price, performance, function. Pick any two.

so to report back, basically restored back to factory settings, got rid of all the extra watch faces etc and now the battery power, much more in line with what I had before, (in just under 24 hours lost 18%). If this was the watch faces, I only had the Garmin ones, so still this is very poor software from them.

so to report back, basically restored back to factory settings, got rid of all the extra watch faces etc and now the battery power, much more in line with what I had before, (in just under 24 hours lost 18%). If this was the watch faces, I only had the Garmin ones, so still this is very poor software from them.

Yeah, they should have better compatibility checks for those watch faces! But glad it helped, short battery life is very frustrating!

Sadly this is not working again, sudden loss of charge form 30 to 5% in like 2 hours and then charged to 100% and dropped immediately to 89% ... Still all basic settings