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Battery Life Issues

9360178
over 5 years ago

Just got a new Vivoactive 4 and was expecting a much better battery life, so far I'm running into a 48hr battery life. Charged my watch fully last night unplugged it before bed and woke up to a watch that had been sitting (did not sleep with it) doing nothing and already drained 20%. 

Very disappointing this is exactly one of the reason I switched, I wanted to worry less about charging my watch every day or two. Is this just a total miss for Garmin or did I just get a lemon? 

  • 0 over 5 years ago

    mine is terrible too! IDK what to do but return it. 

  • 0 over 5 years ago in reply to dawnnhelene

    You may try this method, charge the watch, let it reach 100% and stay overnight with the charger connected.

    Mine VA4 battery drop just 3% from 100% (7am) to 97% (8pm) today. I am not too sure if the battery indicator showing "fake" % anyway...

    Condition: Auto-heart rate ON (note: hear rate sensor continuous blinking even OFF...no way to turn OFF --> BIG BUG!), PulseOx off, wifi not setup, Garmin Pay not setup, watch connected to phone, ZERO access to phone Connect App, ZERO activities.

    I am going to do an activities tonight and observe if the battery drain still remain normal for the following day....

    BTW, very disappointed with the BUGGY VA4...never have issue with my old polar watch.

  • 0 over 5 years ago

    Seems like when the watch is not on the hand than the battery drains faster

    I would say that when the watch is not on the hand everything except the watch and motion detection should be turned off including the screen

  • 0 over 5 years ago in reply to 1592914

    I tried exactly that,  the first day the discharge is slow but within 24 hours or after the first training after the charge it just drains like crazy and uncontrollable, and restarting is the only option. But its crazy i have to keep an eye out if the watch is draining like crazy and make sure to restart it. If i forget to do that, then it discharges very fast and i have to leave it to be charged for hours. 

    Never had any issues with my fibit. Only reason i exchanged my fitbit for a garmin is because the fitbit was bricked within the warranty time so i got my money back and i could buy something "better", or so i thought.................

  • +1 over 5 years ago

    I faced the same issue...down to 0 in 48 hours...after going through various forums, I tried deleting the saved WiFi networks and now after 48 hours of full charge my device still holds about 58%...this action seems promising. As I don't need WiFi unless to update my Spotify downloads, this is still a workable option for me.

  • 0 over 5 years ago

    Got the VA 4 recently, and initially was also very disappointed with the battery life, it was lasting 2-3 days only (on conservative settings, PulseOX at night only, smart pulse monitoring, screen luminosity 30%, no WiFi etc.). I was very seriously considering to return it.

    After using a built-in watchface (which I like and fits my use case, but might not be the same for everyone), things have improved, around 12%  per day for normal smartwatch use, so on target for 7-8 days use.

    However, as others on the thread have noticed as well, after doing an activity the consumption goes way up, to something around 1%-2% PER HOUR. A reset seems to turn things back to normal.

    I hope it's only a firmware bug which can be fixed. Anyone at Garmin monitoring these forums, or do they have some other channel to raise a bug report?

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    My vivoactive 4  spo sensor on 1 and half day, sensor off 3 days no activity. old vivoactive hr battery 5 day no problem 

  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to Aimar80

    The battery life is just terrible, no way near advertised. I contacted Garmin and they said if you want a replacement you have to pay for shipping and figure it out yourself and we might replace it if it's not damaged  which it might get during transit. Very disappointed

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    Hi, I want to share my positive experience with a vivoactive 4 s.

    Although I've read about terrible battery life, I decided to buy a Vivoactive. After comparing 4 and 4 s I even decided to take the smaller 4 s (it's not so bulky on the wrist like the bigger Vivoactive 4; I am a 1,80m male) risking an even worse battery life. I bought it in January 2020 and in the beginning I had some issues as expected. Battery sometimes draining over 1-6%/h, sometimes not. So very inconsistent. So I switched off every unnecessary function (SpO2 sensor, backlight, WiFi, bluetooth...). It still had very differing battery drain from day to day, which was strange. But then: an update in February, and since then I am extremely happy with that watch. I'm even very impressed what Garmin did only by a sofware update/bug fixing. I use the "MyBattery" app to monitor battery consumption: my 4 s (smaller version!!) consumes only 0.655%/h in total average since that update. And that although I did a training schedule for a half marathon during that time and I'm regularly tracking my 15 min bicycle ride to work and back. Right now, I turned off SpO2/WiFi/Physio TrueUp; I don't need the smartwatch function (so bluetooth is mostly turned off, only once a day I sync my daily activity). Fitness tracking is always on, backlight is on level 1 (I try to turn it off during daylight, colours look nicer without backlight anyways, an automatic turn off function via a brightness sensor would have been very useful).

    Using the bluetooth music stream drains battery a lot. But I didn't use that often.

    In the beginning I used the smartwatch function via bluetooth, I think the consumption was around 0.8%/h.

    So since many weeks I only have to charge my watch every 5-6 days which is quite impressive I think. And that with an always on display.

    Only downsides for me: 1) headphone pairing sometimes just doesn't work; 2) no wireless charging; 3) no brightness sensor (for automaticly turn display off during daylight or lit rooms)