battery life seems to drop fasterbatt

Same dissapoinment for me. Recent byer of VA4, instead of practicing fitness, I sadly became a Garmin's "beta-tester" for a week.

My detailed battery measurements with the same setup as yours, showed that battery life drops incredibly fast below  60%. From 100% to 60% droped at 0,3-0,6% per hour. From 60% to 17% droped within 1,5 hours!!!

I have generally had very solid battery life with my VA4 (about 10 days per charge).  One time I had a faster battery drain for 12 hours that seemed to be triggered by the use of WiFi (an update check that used wifi).  I powered the watch off for 5 minutes and then back on and that cleared things up.

I just can't figure out why it's now draining so fast out of nowhere

I think wifi can cause a battery drain.  For example, the watch turns on wifi for some function (like checking for updates) and then doesn't turn it off successfully.  I noticed there is a setting in the wifi settings for "auto upload" of data.  I leave that setting off and do everything through my phone with bluetooth.

i just checked, and that options appears to be disabled already. So it wouldn't be that in my case.

I've had similar setup as yours, stock watch face, no wifi, no music, no gps tracking, not even garmin pay is setup, I dont even use bluetooth connection with my phone other than to sync it once or twice a day. Other than just wearing it as a watch i have hrm on the default setting out of the box and i workout about 4-5 hours a week, that's it. Based on this i have to charge my watch every 4th day coz on the 5th day it dies in the middle of the day when im at work. This is nowhere near the upto 8 days claim garmin makes. I am now on my 4th watch and the retailer i bought it from here in netherlands says that they might have received a bad batch because other customers have approached them with a similar problem, so now they have asked garmin to replace my watch instead of the retailer itself. However, the garmin support is so excruciatingly slow it feels like the 7th circle of hell. If this 5th watch has similar issues i think i am going to ask for my money back, coz working out 4-5 hours a week should not reduce battery life by 3 days!

agreed, having a lifetime half of what is advertised when being idle all the time is already considered some serious misadvertising. If it is effectively a bad batch, I'll go over to the garmin retailer I bought it

To give a quick update. I performed a reset and erased all data to see if it works any better. However, my battery is now dropping every faster when idling. I left this morning with 53% on the battery, merely 4 hours later, it dropped to 44%, that's over 2% per hour idle. I will go and have it checked out and hopefully get it replaced.

I hope replacement works for you I am on my 4th watch and they have all had the same problem. I'm just guessing some batches were just defective as not everyone has this problem. But sad to say this Garmin is not willing to officially accept this and come up with a worldwide solution