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Wrist HR active even with chest strap

When I'm working out, I put on my chest strap heart monitor. A pop-up on the watch says it's connected. But I notice that the green lights are still flashing as if the wrist HR is still active. I'm not sure if this is by design or an issue.

  • Hello! The green lights should be disabled. Can you remove the strap from the settings of the watch, power the watch off then back on and add the heart rate strap back. Keep me posted if this works! 

  • Actually, the green leds will probably stay flashing, as OHR is also used to determine if the watch has been taken off and the pin needs to be re-entered when Garmin pay is used.  Normally you only need to enter the pin every 24 hours, but if you take off the watch, you need to reenter the pin next time GP is used.

  • Hi. I don't even have Garmin Pay setup yet, so I would hope the watch is programed to not always keep the green lights on in this case. Besides, having the HR monitoring non-stop would most likely contribute to the already horrible battery life. Plus, couldn't the watch determine if it's on your wrist by using the accelerometers?

    Also, it makes it confusing to know where the HR measurements are being taken from when the green lights are on; is it the watch, or my chest strap?

  • OHR by default will be on 24/7 when you wear the watch.  It's the same for any garmin watch with OHR.

    It's in a low power mode, and you can tell because the green leds flash.  When it's used in an activity, the leds are on solid.

  • With V5 it remained on for me. With the recent Beta and V5.3 it's now off with HR straps...

  • The lights are always on or flashing unless you have a Heart rate strap connected to the device. In some cases, you may see the  lights on but the HR strap overrides the settings.  

  • Hi, I tried this and the lights are still on. In the "wrist Heart Rate" setting, status is "auto" and "broadcast in activity" is on. Does that broadcast setting need to be turned off? 

    Also, I have beta 5.21 installed currently. 

  • Broadcasting during activity you should turn off unless this is a feature you need... do you connect your watch to other devices on which you record your heart rate?

  • I suppose I'm not broadcasting my wrist HR to anything. I generally connect my chest HRM to my Concept2 rower. The watch is supposed to be displaying the HR from the chest HRM as well.

    I've never had this many issues with the FR235 I have. I was hoping the VA4 would be an upgrade. But it's been so buggy and the battery life issue makes me want to go back to the FR235. I have until the end of January to be able to return to Amazon. I really hope Garmin at least fixes the battery life issue before then.

  • Broadcast HR is only there to broadcast the optical HR reading of the watch, used when one doesn't have a chest HRM but needs to have HR on another device. Example; cycling with an EDGE device and HR is then recorded from the watch. 

    Ive checked my device again. My HR light turn off when starting an activity when a chest HRM is connected. 

    Broadcasting will just drain battery unnecessarily. The watch has two modes for measuring HR. One is a low power mode that measures your HR and HRV  (for stress and breathing) 24/7. The high power mode the light ramp up in brightness and are used when starting an activity or broadcasting HR. 

    Previously on V5 and before my watch stayed in low power HR mode while in an activity with chest HRM attached.