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Battery Life 245M

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?

  • Mine dropped 50% in 15 hours today, no activitities, the first 2 weeks it only took around 20% in 24 hours. What could be the cause?

  • You're right. These are basics. And no secret for Garmin. They set the safe limits, so if you see 0, that's real 10 or 15% and upper limit just like that. So you do not need to worry about and Garmin does not have to replace the watches every 3 months. ;)

  • My phone loses anywhere from 3-5% with using GPS for the day. I have however noticed one time my phone and watch weren’t connecting and my battery drained at an alarming rate. I couldn’t figure out what it was. I noticed when I went to sync the watch to my phone that they were unable to connect. I restarted my watch and have be fine ever since. Far better then any GPS watch I’ve had from any company. 

  • Contacted Garmin support over this, who agreed the battery drain I was getting was excessive.

    Suggested I return to point of purchase for an exchange.

    I now have a replacement watch and cannot believe the difference in battery life - getting around 10% drain in 24 hours which seems to be similar to others on here and more like Garmin's product specs.

    If you are experiencing battery drain like I had then get an exchange, as there's clearly an issue with some of the watches out there.

  • Hey JezGreen.
    Happy to read you managed to sort out your defective unit.

    Am expriencing the exact same thing with my FR245M and was wondering if anyone else has had this issue and found a fix that does not involve RMA'ing/replacing the unit please? (My local official garming supplier/importer is notriously bad when it comes to helping customers)

    Thanks

    (Currently did pretty much what JezGreen did in terms of battery life maximization/optimization, even took it further and have no sleep monitoring SPo2 measurement) and am getting roughly 24 hours of battery life, just on "standard 300$ smart watch mode" (no GPS tracking for activites, no activites at all).