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Vivoactive 3 suddenly experiencing severe battery drain

My 2.5 year old Vivoactive 3 is usually great with battery life, lasting several days even with activities being recorded. Usual battery life is around 10% drain per day without activities. Several times in the last year or so I've experienced a sudden battery drain which has always been fixed by restoring factory settings. About 3 days ago this issue resurfaced but I have not been able to fix it using my usual methods. All settings have been adjusted to where I usually have them - 10% brightness, short backlight timing etc etc, but I'm at a loss as to why it has so suddenly started draining a full battery in 6-12 hours.

In looking through other forum posts I've at least managed to fix the GPS sensor issue I've had for the last few months, but unfortunately it hasn't magically fixed my battery issue. It's dropped 2% while typing this.

I really like my watch and don't like having to buy new tech when it's been working so well. Please advise what I can do to fix it Garmin!

  • I'm experiencing the same. I left the watch last night with 80% battery and this morning it was off.

  • It is their latest update. 8.1 and no way to roll back to the previous version. Have emailed Garmin and they want me to exchange for £96 I'll either wait for an update or buy a non Garmin watch. Very disappointed.

  • They want to exchange what? For a new watch!? I hope it is a joke. How is possible to ruin an almost perfect product with a software update? I would be disappointed too.

  • I have also experienced battery drains on my vivoactive 3 occasionally (a few times per year). Typically turning it off by long-pressing (about 15sec) the button and turning it on by pressing the button for about 1sec fixed the problem for me.

  • Exchange for a reconditioned Vivoactive 3. A new one is only £150 on Amazon.

  • That has been working for me up until this time. I've restored factory settings, done a hard reset, but no luck. It still can't last a full day when a week ago it would easily last 5 days!  I can't tell when the update occurred, my watch automatically updates, but from other forum posts it seems that was a while ago, not in the last week...

  • Same here.

    Mine is a bit old one, but up until recently had no issues with battery life. I charged it to 100% yesterday evening and mid-day today it's at 50% with no activities. Something's clearly not right.

  • Yes very annoying! I'm not sure how often they release updates. Rolled back to the 7.72 beta update but still the same results. Not sure whether it is a sensor issue so might try and find an update for them. I've heard of people getting a replacement out of warranty free of charge. Which seems unfair to others who can't get this.

  • Unfortunately getting a replacement free of charge is not an option in the market where I live.

    What's interesting is it seems that not every watch was affected, otherwise we'd have a lot more people filling the forums with complaints.

    Hopefully garmin comes out with a fix.

  • Good morning, 

    I probably solved the problem by updating manually the vivoactive.

    It was appearing a version 0.00 on the GPS sensor. I manually update the software twice and finally, it was appearing the right version.