VIVIOACTIVE watch used for golf

Strange, mine works for 27 holes with battery to spare, which is within the specs of 9 hours of GPS. I have a refurbished one now, but the original still made it easy 27 holes after 3 years. It must be a problem with the battery draining faster then normal. Do you experience other issues with battery drain without GPS ?

Not really just golf, 27 holes would be great. I have switched off vibration mode to see if that helps

Typically screen lighting, GPS and bluetooth/Music take most juice from the battery, but I assume you have minimized that. Without GPS i should last a couple of days on battery. I have the My Battery widget and it indicates about 5 days on watch mode, so that is fine. You can perhaps install it and experiment a bit with options on/off or other background widgets that misbehave, although the OS should kill them in the background after a bit. My hint would be to install https://apps.garmin.com/nl-NL/apps/a9c9b981-1f4c-4399-a270-7d6c7317893e Battery widget and have a look at what it projects in the sense of juice being used.

It needs some experimentation, with the gps on it tells me 200%+ per day but that is probably due to me switching between the golf app and the battery widget. It should be around 270% or so I guess to make the 9 hours.  If I think about it during the game tomorrow I will check after 9 holes what it says ;-)

Other tip, search for battery draining entries in the forum. I know that after a OS upgrade people are complaining about it and I have read some strategies to improve it (if I remember correctly).

Here is one on issues with Wifi Sync :

forums.garmin.com/.../wifi-sync-causing-massive-battery-drain---apac-va3m

So, the battery widget reports 9% per hour while playing golf, which is good enough for about 10 hours of play, so I would make 36 holes. 12 holes is way too low, so either your battery is not charging fully (perform a hard reset when it is empty perhaps), tour battery is end of life (but I would expect issues in day to day then as well) or you are using background juice for something else.

I use a VA3 Music by the way, that may be a difference

Mine is showing 18% when playing golf, problem with a hard reset is that my laptop is down at the moment so I have no access to Garmin express