Battery drain on the V4S - again

I have reduced the screen brightness to about 30% and am testing the batter usage with one of the default faces. It does not appear to make a difference. I am still only getting about 1.8% per hour.

Other people are reporting usage around 0.5% per hour. I have no idea how to achieve this in a reasonable mannor. 

first you can disable and remove everything, use simplest possible watchface without permanent seconds indicator, 10% brightness, disable gesture etc and check battery usage with this minimal settings. Then you can add features little by little and check battery.

Same!!

Without pulseox, it goes down about 12% while sleeping, which is about 1.5%/hr for doing pretty much nothing (DND is on, so no notifications, etc) except track HR basically.

So I just finished doing some battery testing.

I have been using a minimal watch face for a while now and been getting good battery life, but I had also been using limited features and wanted to test out how much that was affecting my battery life. So for three days I kept my limited watch face (the pre-installed Garmin watch face with the swirling wires with only time (no seconds bar), date, battery%, and sunrise/sunset displayed) but I turned on a bunch of features.  I changed the settings then charged the watch using a wall charger to 100%.  I am using a VA4 (not VA4s)

So my set up for the first three days

• limited watch face described above
• PulseOx on 8 hours a day at night
• Bluetooth on 24/7 (connected to the phone most of the time, but sometimes out of range)
• HR monitoring 24/7
• Steps tracking, Sleep tracking on 24/7
• Noitificatons ON  (I am not a heavy user of notifications, but they were on and I did get some)
• Brightness set at 10%
• Wrist twist activation of backlight (man did I find this annoying, but I kept it on)
• No music use, Music source set to "Phone" when not in use and left there
• Hydration Alert on (thought this was performing spotty at best, but it was on)
• Incident detection on
• Live tracking off
• Do not disturb on at night
• Autolock off
• Vibration set to low
• Physio TrueUp on
• Data recording (sometimes every second, sometimes Auto, I switched this setting mid test for other reasons (a GPS test), but it didn't seem to affect battery life)
• 1 hour 33 minutes of GPS runs (regular GPS, no GLONASS or Galileo)

With this setup, after three days I was at 68% of battery life, so about 10% per day and a pace of 9-10 days of battery life per charge.

Then for two days I had the exact same setup, but I also changed the watch face to a third party watch face and displayed things like live heart rate and steps on the watch face (but still no seconds).

In those two days I had 1 hour and 50 minutes of GPS runs and a swim/indoor bike workout.

The battery life went from 68% to 24%.  That is a 44% drop in two days.  Now I watched the battery during my run and swim/bike workout and estimate they cost about 10%, but that is still 34% over two days, significantly worse than what I was getting with the plain watch face set up (which also included some GPS runs).

One other thing I noticed.  One of the nights during the first three days (plain watch face), the PulseOx seemed to drain the battery worse than the other two (about 5% vs. about 2%).  I suspect that the watch was a little loose that night and caused the PulseOx to drain the battery a little more. 

If I subtract out the GPS use and excess PulseOx drain estimates for the first three days, I estimate about 22% baseline drain over the first three days vs. 34% baseline drain over the last two days.  The watch face makes a big difference.

just installed GPS 2.80 and had massive battery drain... did a couple of restarts and that 15s-TopButton Power off ... started some activities and stopped them again. Cycled Bluetooth on and off a couple times

finally swapping the GPS mode to Galieo and back to Glonas seemed to restore dignety.

Now I have 3% drain over 9hours again... PulseOX at night drains about 10% so, I'll end up with roughly 15%/day again.

after 4.00 I had the same issues and they finally stopped after I noticed it wasn't tracking my laps while swimming ... tried shutting down, but the backlight did not turn off during the shutdown, did a 15s-TopButton Power off, and after that reboot it finally got the hang of it.

looks to me that the watch might have problems to fire up its sensors correctly, and therefore maybe trying to start them continuesly ... and cycling all those sensores off and on a few times does the trick... at least in my case

I have been testing the watch for the last few days. I am finding battery usage to be highly variable for no reason that I can see. 

One day I am using below 1% per hour, the next day the usage goes to 5% per hour. The settings are exactly the same and the usage is also roughly the same.

So far, I have been able to achieve about 2.5 days on a charge with Bluetooth turned off most of the time, gesture off, PulseOX only on at night and screen brightness at about 30%. I use activity tracking for about an hour per day.

These results are very disappointing and I hope Garmin is working on fixing the batter issues.

This is marked as answer but does this really work for anybody?

For me there is no change if I charge from any wall charger or from PC port.

Now I really gave up this fight, turned on PulseOx and don't care about battery anymore because it is hopeless. With no activity I am between 1.5 and 2% per our and when bateery is under 35% it is even more, near 3%. Last percents are disappearing really fast. I tried all these tricks like factory reset reinstall phone apps, pairing and unpairing and for short amount of time I am able to reach 0 3% per hour, but after one or two charging cycles, with no setting change, everything is back to "normal". In other words if I want to use watch effectively and track some activity from day to day I need to charge every day. Would be good to know this before buying

Interesting is that turning all day PulseOX measurement did not really has big power consumption impact for me. Also therefore I still believe there is something on background what is draining the power and has much more impact than all these adjustable settings which we can influence 

Despite fiddling with the settings I've been using about 2.2% an hour. GPS and pulse ox turned off. Turning Bluetooth off made no difference.

Doesn't last 2 days before needing to be charged. Very frustrating 

So I think there may be a battery drain issue with wifi.  I pressed update in settings and the watch connected to wifi to check for an update (there was none).  But thereafter, my battery started to drain faster.  Not dramatically so, but noticeable for me.  I turned the watch off, waited, and it turned it back on again and that seems to have cleared things up so far.  Oddly, my battery life went from 59% to 60% in the restart process and stayed there for hours, so maybe it was a calibration issue. 

I also looked at the settings for wifi and noticed an option to auto upload, which I leave off. I upload via my phone.  If that was on and used wifi, I could see how that could potentially trigger a battery drain issue in a way that would seem random.