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Battery Life 245M

JezGreen
over 4 years ago

After a week of use of the FR245M I’m experiencing battery life way below the claimed 6/7 days in smartwatch mode.

Currently a full charge with no recorded activities, no music playback and observing some of Garmin’s battery saving advice such as using a watch face with no moving seconds and turning off pulse Ox and notifications is getting me just under 48 hours before running down to 0%.

I am still using the heart rate /sleep monitoring etc but I consider these to be normal metrics for smart watch mode.

Am I missing something here? Is Garmin’s claim for 7 day battery life based on operating in ‘basic watch’ mode only with all monitoring turned off or have I bought a dud?

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    Cant say im getting stellar battery life either to be honest. Charged yesterday morning and now (7pm the next day) am on 62% battery) .. i'll push it to 4 days possibly but my VA3M had better battery life than this

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    I'm also experiencing poor battery life with the FR245. In watch only mode I'm seeing 40% battery drain per 24 hours. 

    Current Settings:

    -Phone notifications disabled

    -Simple digital clock watch face

    -Backlight set to 8s

    -All activity backgrounds are set to black

    -No ANT+ devices connected

    -HR is ON

    Curious if there is a setting that needs to be changed or possibly a firmware bug? If this is realistic battery life, its quite disappointing. 

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    I came here expecting to see the opposite. Mine has been better than expected, less than 10% per day if I don't use GPS. I only have phone call notifications enabled and I sync to an iPhone xr.

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    using watchface with seconds, continously HR-monitoring and no BT-connection to phone and loosing roughly 10% per day. Works perfect for me

  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to kehanra99

    Do you have heart rate enabled? 

  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to kehanra99

    Agreed, mine has been better than expected as well. Everything enabled (including HR, notifications etc) other than night time PulseOx and if I don't utilise GPS on any given day I'm only dropping by about 9% every 24 hours.

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    I thought I’d found a solution by letting it run down to zero a few times before a full charge. (It sometimes helped with the constant battery issues I used to have with my old 405).

    It then only lost around 10% in 24 hours.

    I then I used it with GPS enabled for a half marathon which still only dropped it to about 80% but after this it lost 30-40% per day as before.

    Looking at the responses it looks like I’m in the minority and have a watch that’s not quite right.

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    Mine (not the M version), with auto light in night only, continuous HR, 4 hours GPS+Glon per week and arround 20 notifications per day, not wearing at night and turning it off, lasts 8-10 days. This is enough for me.

  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to JezGreen

    The Garmin watches probably come with Li Ion or LiPo batteries I'd guess? Shouldn't you never ever discharge them to zero? I think this basically destroys the cells, and the advice for laptops for example is to *never* discharge them below around 15%. (Also charging them from around 92 to 100% is supposed to be another really bad thing, which is why ThinkPad's for example have a mechanism where you can stop charging at around 95%.)

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    Same here. I'm going to try running it down to 0% and give it a full charge. I think I had this same problem when I got my 235 a few years ago, and it eventually ironed itself out. Hopefully this watch does it too