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Battery draining 20-25% per day

7708812
over 4 years ago

I bought VA4 about a week ago, fully charged it to 100%. Pulse ox off, notifications off, gestures low sensitivity, timeout fast, brightness 10%. Used Garmin watch face. 
Had one 30 minutes cardio session, otherwise on smart watch mode the whole duration. 
Battery drained to 5% in 4 days. No way near 8 days advertised. I chose the watch for battery life.

I tried Venu 2 weeks ago and I got 6.5 days battery life with same settings as above, however the screen gestures didn’t work when lying down exercising on the floor. Had to sit up right of it to respond.

Any experiences with Vivoactive 4 battery, has Garmin responded to this issue?

  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to 7708812

    I think HR on the watch face may be more of a battery drain than steps because HR constantly fluctuates. And this certainly doesn't explain all of the battery issues people are having. Just trying to suggest some things people can try.

    I use the watch primarily for tracking my runs, etc and for Garmin Coach, so I am still using plenty of features and I am still tracking HR and steps, just not displaying them on the watch face. Hopefully, more efficient watch faces will come out in the future, because I would prefer more data on the watch face, but I value battery life more.

    I haven't used the Venu, but my undestanding is that even in "always on" mode it is just displaying the time when it is not in use, so it is effectively dealing with the HR issue in a different way.

    I don't use notifications out of personal preference, but the time I tested it out, it didn't seem to kill the battery much for me.  PulseOx only cost me about 2% per 8 hours, so I might turn that back on at night.  So I could probably use more features than I do and still get decent battery life.  Music is definitely a battery killer (10% per hour of use). I would use that more if it wasn't such a battery killer.

  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to 7708812

    Actually the Venu thing does lead to something people could try if they want a more detailed watch face. They could try third party watch faces and enable the battery saver feature meant for the Venu that just displays the time when not in use. That may get around the frequently updating data issue.

  • +1 over 4 years ago in reply to moolash

    Intuitively, I would tend to agree with you on notifications but my limited testing didn't really show it.  Also, when I first got the watch, I was only getting 4-5 days of battery life and I was not using notifications or bluetooth back then either.  The three things I did when I had the "night and day" transformation on battery life (and it really was "night" and "day") was 1. Change the watch face as I described above; 2. Charge the watch for an hour past when it said 100% to make sure it was fully charged and 3. Swich the source in Music from "My Music" (or it might have been Amazon) to "Phone", which (with bluetooth off) greyed out the music player (at the time I was thinking the music player might be the source of the battery leak).  Since those changes (about 4 weeks ago), my battery life has been consistantly good. (knock on wood)

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    next battery one day test for compare: fully charged,  BT on, notifications on, activity tracking on, pulse ox in sleep, 52 minutes some session with GPS, watch face with date, time, distance, steps, calories, HR, movebar + 7 state icons (in low power mode refresh 1 minute) and after day I have 85% battery. So almost full potential of VA4 without music for 15% per day, imho ok (Garmin promises 12,5% in smartwatch mode, 15% is smartwatch mode + 50min GPS)

  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to jha2

    So if you subtract out the GPS use you are probably looking at around 12% per day. Considering you are also using pulseOx for sleep, that is pretty good. Sounds like the 1 minute refresh battery saver helped.

  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to jha2

    A suugestion for an additional feature for the watch face. The ability to get a data refresh by tapping the screen.

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    I decided to test my gps function for the first time on my watch and took a walk around the block , I switched it off after 10 minutes and ended the activity. Battery from 12% to 9% Then fully charged the watch at 11PM= 100%  , woke up at 04h30 = 54%; that’s just 5.5 hours guys , with no activity. This proves to me that the GPS uses battery in the background even when switch off.

    Watch settings were as follows:

    Standard Garmin watch face

    Backlight 10%

    wrist HR ON

    Pulse ox OFF

    Bluetooth OFF

    Activity tracking ON

    Move alert OFF

    MoveIQ OFF

    Physio Trueup ON

    Incident Detection OFF

    Notifications OFF

    no Wifi

    no Garmin Pay

    no music

    GPS OFF

    Come on Garmin this is ridiculous. There is something that they didn’t do right with this watch. If the GPS is using battery in the background even when it off surely they have to do something. Garmin just sent me a generic email saying they are aware of the battery issues and their Engineers are working on it. 

  • 0 over 3 years ago in reply to Denise

    This is the last Garmin I will ever buy, I am done with Garmin. No customer support , no problem solving; just some generic answers that leaves one more frustrated. I am done, I will be trying other brands in the future. Thanks for your feedback 

  • 0 over 3 years ago in reply to 7708812

    Do you have some data field or some other from app store? I had some data field from store in bike activity and after bike session I lost 5% battery per hour. So I uninstalled it and battery drain has been removed. Implementation of some CIQ apps is not battery friendly. (btw currently I have long term avg 0.508%/hr)

  • 0 over 3 years ago in reply to 7708812

    I have been having the same issue with battery since I bought the Vivoactive 4s less than a month ago.  Customer service isn’t helpful at all so I started to test it everything myself.

    I tried every single possible way of testing each function and how much battery it drains per hour. Yesterday I have added some extra widgets to my scrolling list like, calendar, weather, last sport etc and went to sleep. When I woke up this morning about 45% of my battery was gone just through the night about 6h. I got mad and decided to remove from the list every widget that is smart and unnecessary for me: calendar, weather, music controls, coach, menstrual tracker, notification etc. I have now about 14 available widgets to be added once they will find the fix. Than I fully charged battery about 2h, power off the watch, switched on and wore on my hand whole day today.

    The result was unbelievable within 11h it drained only 3% of battery. Than I did cardio for 1,5h and battery dropped by additional 5%. It’s 12,5h since my last charge and including 3min sync with garmin connect and 1,5h exercise and now I have it 88% left. I’m really happy with that. Now it will drain only when I use for activity which is how it supposed to be. 

    i need to mention that I have all not fitness related things off like no notifications, no wifi, gps only for the activities that I use outside otherwise off, bluetooth off (only when I wanna sync with app 3min on), automatic lock on, 0 notifications, no recognising activities, no music set up, no facebook or contacts, no phone connection except when I sync manually. Pulse ox I have all day on, watch face crystal, now I have on only fitness watch:  my day, heart rate, pulse ox, stress, health stats, steps, body battery, calories, breaths per min, history, intensity, my battery and hydration widgets. 

    It turned out for me that all this Widgets are draining the battery. It’s like they are constantly background refreshing even when not in use or if they weren’t set up in the first place like music.

    It is still very disappointing that for the money you pay for this watch all this functions have to be off just to keep the battery lasting longer. I only choose this watch due to the advert of up to 7days battery which is not reliable.... 

    good luck everyone fingers crossed they will come up with some update!!