6.90 battery drain is twice as fast

Between my battery draining at a higher rate than when I originally purchased the watch and the HR not being accurate in different profiles, I am ready to just jump to the Apple watch.   I know their battery is not any better, but at least it has an accurate HR reading.  So frustrating!  I've been a Garmin watch user for several years. 

I managed to recover my battery life with the following settings. Turn off auto activity start. Turn off backlight gesture.

Now I'm back to 16%/day drain with smart watch usage

My watch is two years old. Prior to 6.9 upgrade i had 3-4 days between recharge and i do gps activities at least once a day somedays twice a day. Now i have to recharge twice a day. 

My auto activity and back light gesture has always been off. I used to get 4-5 days. About 10 days after the last update I started to only get one day. I’m going to try to phone support today. 

I'm not sure where I found it, but I came across a suggestion that seems to have solved the issue. Not sure why, I did a factory reset then, when back up went outside and started the 'run' activity. Let the GPS connect and go for approximately two minutes.  Problem resolved. 

Nope. All good here and back to charging every fourth day. Sorry the 'fix' did not work for you.

As noted above, Garmin was nice enough to send a new replacement watch to see if a brand new unit would solve the problem.  After many days testing, as I suspected, it has absolutely no effect.  

New watch starts from factory reset state by definition.  I configured it identical to my original watch then wore both watches on the same arm next to each other for many days.  I got some interesting looks from people until I explained what was up.  I wrote down battery state of both watches every 4 to 6 hours day after day.  In the end, the battery drain between the two watches was darn near identical, within 1 % of each other all the time.  The slight variance came because the watch that was the Preferred Activity Tracker consumed a fraction more battery power due to occasional uploads to the phone.

neilswingler  suggested turning off Auto Activity Start and the gesture to turn on backlight.  Both great ideas for sure as they will consume power.  In my case, both have always been off.  So I know neither of these is involved.

Garmin needs to come to the conclusion that they broke something in the 6.90 update and figure out what it is.  This is not a hardware issue.  Look at all the people complaining their happy hardware suddenly went bade with the 6.90 release.  They added some new features, potentially one of them is pounding on power.  However it amazes me they could release a version of firmware that doubles the battery consumption or worse and they did not notice it.  A consumer product development company the size of Garmin must have an extensive test suite that includes many devices simultaneously, they should have noticed this, but still chose to release this hideous code release deeming the changes acceptable.  

I'll be calling support back to advise of what I learned in my testing, who knows if anything will come of it.  In the mean time, the previous watch is on it's way back to Kansas.

I finally was able to try the Restore Defaults and then use GPS immediately after "trick" and it has restored my battery life.  I highly recommend at least trying this before having to go through the RMA process.  My VA3 is about 18 months old.

My battery totally drains in 5 days with the watch off the whole time.