Vivoactive 3 battery drain

You'll find several threads on this subject. Mine is about 3 years old and started suffering fast battery drain (less than 24 hours) a couple of updates ago. I'm not the only one on here suffering so I suspect there's some combination of firmware/hardware that causes it and I expect it'll get fixed at some point. Not everyone has the problem so a different watch may well fix it. At least you'll have some warranty if it doesn't.

I guess whether it's worth paying extra $$ for depends on how patient you are. Personally I lost mine and bought a Fenix 5 at the current knock down price. Currently enjoying about 10 days using it in a similar way to how I used the vivosmart 3. Meanwhile on the Fenix 5 forum there are several complaining about battery life since the latest update.

Go figure.

Mine was under 2 years old and started only lasting 2 days in the last 2-4 weeks.  I wonder if there is something in the design that can easily break and cause battery drain. 

FWIW: I had that happen just after 6.60 applied and it turns out that auto-start activity was enabled (it wasn’t before the update), so the gps was activating when it shouldn’t.

i manually turned off auto-start activity and battery usage is back to normal. 

Thanks for your reply. I checked. It is turned off.

My 18 month old Vivoactive 3 is doing the same thing. Just within the past two weeks, the battery is at 10 percent after 14 hours of use with just a couple of 60 minute non-gps workouts. I have an outdoor century ride on Sunday and I really don't want to carry a battery just to boost it during water stops. Chat told me to do the factory reset and to clean the contacts with rubbing alcohol. That did nothing to improve things. 

My V3, about 15 months old, started to drain battery like there's no tomorrow. I did a cycle ride of about 1hr on Tuesday evening then an update to 6.60 got auto-applied on Wednesday morning. Since that update it has been absolutely awful - I need to recharge it twice per day - its draining at about 8-10% per hour - e.g. in 3 hours its gone down from 81% to 57%.

I've uninstalled the watch faces (I've used actiface since buying the device and had no problem with it)

I've factory reset

Have restarted it several times.

Altered backlight setting to minimum, auto start activity is OFF.

Have done an activity - sometimes in the past the battery went a bit loopy and doing a ride/run would sort it, not this time :-(

I've done everything I can think of/recommended. I'm putting it down to something in v6.60 that is causing excessive battery drain on mine. 

I called their customer support number. They walked me through some troubleshooting steps. Install Garmin Express, sign in to the Connect account associated with the watch, remove three folders via Finder on Mac or Explorer on Windows (Activity, Monitor and Settings) and asked me to test it for the next 24-48 hours after a full charge. The support specialist said this could happen if there was any corrupt data. I will be happy to report back in a couple of days.

My VA3 is about 2 months old, running v6.60 with Actiface and a couple of widgets, syncing via Android on a OnePlus 5T. Battery widget shows 0.468 %/hr or about 8 days remaining. Drain has been consistently low or "as advertised" thru the last several firmware releases. I have no complaints with this particular watch at all.

That said, I tried a previous VA3 when I was using an iphone (SE & XS) a couple months ago and returned it because it simply would not pair with either iphone. I mean ZERO despite following every single tech tip on the internet. That VA3 was preceded by a Fenix 5 that I ran for maybe 2 years but it too refused to pair with the iphones though it always worked fine w Android.

My solution to the paring issue was to simply go back to my Android but this would not explain people's current battery drain issues as I currently have no complaints at all which is very unusual for me with Garmin products haha!

Thanks, hope it does some good. I'd have thought a reset to defaults (which I did at the weekend) would have wiped those folders but who knows!

Am tempted to try to find the firmware for the last stable version - anyone know which previous version was ok? - drop it onto the device and restart it, but also wary of doing that in case it completely bricks the watch!

Did they indicate if it was possible to enter a diagnostics/debug mode on the watch?

Having to charge it twice per day and turn off at night now, so annoying!

2nd Update: No change in battery drain behavior. I called Garmin again and they are replacing it under warranty. I have to say I was very impressed with their customer service via phone. Online chat support is questionable.