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Data-rich watchface vs. Garmin default and battery drain

oleksiy.yergiyev
over 3 years ago

Hi, I tested my VA4 with a different watchface - installed a regular default Garmin’s to see if battery drain changes at all. To my surprise, the difference is huge - 0.5-0.6% / hour with Garmin's WF vs. 0.8-1.1% / hour with my usual ActiFace. To make sure the results are sustainable, I used Garmin WF for several charging cycles. ActiFace remained inactive but still installed on the watch. 

Now, Garmin watchface has a moving circle showing seconds at all times, this updating the screen every second, while I configure my ActiFace in such a way that the most often changing metric shown is minutes. 

I wonder if anyone have had different experience with other watchfaces? This is about data-rich watchfaces similar to ActiFace, DataLover etc. Looking for better battery performance comparing to my current setup, while hopefully retaining data output.

  • 0 over 3 years ago

    Yes, built in watch faces are hard to beat in battery usage, they seem to be optimized for that. As for decent watchfaces which doesn't have big battery drain, I've had a good experience with Fusion.

  • 0 over 3 years ago in reply to sensovision

    Thanks, will check on it, looks good and crowded too. 

  • 0 over 3 years ago

    Crystal is also quite good, enough data, good looking and seems that it doesn't take much battery (I recommend still that you configure seconds "off")

  • 0 over 3 years ago

    I was having the same question regarding battery usage. I 'm now testing the Phoenix V2 watchface with the battery saving setting to 'always' and disable battery saving on gesture to 'yes'. I also disabled the tilt sensor when no activity and brightness set to 10%. So I always see the date, clock and battery status. Only when I touch the watch the backlight turns on and I see all metrics. I'm now at 54% since mondayevening (3.5 days) with 2.5h of GPS activity, not wearing the watch at night.

  • 0 over 3 years ago in reply to Wolfindal

    Crystal is quite cool indeed, my wife used to have it for a while. Not enough data points for me though

  • 0 over 3 years ago in reply to sensovision

    I tried Fusion, it works really well, showing 0.5-0.7% per hour mostly. Sometimes the watch goes into a "battery drain" mode increasing consumption up to 1.2-1.5% per hour, have to soft reset it to discontinue the process. My watch has about 9-10 hour GPS on capacity remaining, so about 50% of battery degradation. I think a new watch should perform much better. 

    Overall, it's a very good alternative to ActiFace, which is much more battery hungry, thank you. 

  • 0 over 3 years ago in reply to oleksiy.yergiyev
    oleksiy.yergiyev said:
    Overall, it's a very good alternative to ActiFace, which is much more battery hungry, thank you. 

    No problem and I'm happy to hear that it's working well for you, it has nice potential and I really like how it can show ambient temperature once you enter offset for me, it's 5 degrees Celsius.

    I wonder how old is your watch? As I'm not sure if I can get the number of GPS hours stated by Garmin even on my relatively new watch(though I never performed a test or had whole day activity like hiking, and I'm also using sensors, so probably that's not a fair comparison).

  • 0 over 3 years ago in reply to sensovision
    sensovision said:
    I wonder how old is your watch? As I'm not sure if I can get the number of GPS hours stated by Garmin even on my relatively new watch(though I never performed a test or had whole day activity like hiking, and I'm also using sensors, so probably that's not a fair comparison)

    It's been used for about 19 month first by my wife and then by myself. It fared just over 9 hours during all day hike last month, and it more or less matches the 10-12% per hour battery drain with GPS on on shorter activities like running and rowing.

    Last summer my wife used to have about 40% battery remaining after 8-10 hour hikes, so the degradation is there. 

  • 0 over 3 years ago in reply to oleksiy.yergiyev

    wow, if that difference wasn't cause by firmware changes or other factors that would be a huge battery degradation for rather short period of time. Have you charged your watch from 0-100% or used some gentle charge policy like 25-75% to prolong battery life?

  • 0 over 3 years ago in reply to sensovision
    sensovision said:
    Have you charged your watch from 0-100% or used some gentle charge policy like 25-75% to prolong battery life

    My usual charging pattern is 20-90%. BTW, have similar situation with my second watch, Fenix 5S+, only GPS on time went down to about 5 hours in the course of two years, used to be about 9 hours.