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Foreman 245 SW 3.90 Battery Life?

Erikmatey
over 5 years ago

I had updated to SW 3.70 at the release about a week or two ago and on my first 2 runs with it, had a higher than previous battery drain.  I downgraded back to 3.52 and things are better.  I'm wondering from those that have upgraded to 3.90, has your battery drain been as expected?

  • 0 over 5 years ago in reply to gadgetrants

    I don’t have anything from Connect IQ installed, don’t get notifications, don’t have pulse ox turned on, don’t have gesture backlight, etc and I drained 15% over 16 hours with just a 1 hour run during that time period. Not the previous battery life I got from my 245 before this update. 

  • 0 over 5 years ago in reply to gadgetrants

    Update -- I just dug all the way down to Settings -> System -> Software Update and noticed that I had an unapplied update.  I ran it and it looks like it was a "sensor update."  I vaguely remember seeing a notification for it -- was it with yesterday's FW update? -- but it seems that it didn't actually apply until I selected and ran it.  Will post back here if I see any improvement in battery life.

  • +1 over 5 years ago in reply to gadgetrants

    Found 2 potential suspects: 

    • Added all-day respiration, respiration widget, and breathwork activity

    Just noticed the the 3.90 update includes Respiration Rate which is automatically on the list of potential drain causes.  And to add to the mystery IIUC it's FirstBeat's widget, which to my mind means there's the potential for an engineering "gap" between the FirstBeat SW team and the Garmin HW team, i.e., not only a gap in how the new feature taps into existing 245 resources but also in how the issue can be tested and identified.  

    ANT/BLE/BT Is at version 5.01. While we have historically used the ending of .00 with our production updates, this will change for some updates moving forward. This is a production update and is not a beta release. 

    Not clear that BT was updated with 3.90 but if so, it's another obvious place to check since it's normally running 24/7.

  • 0 over 5 years ago in reply to gadgetrants

    Update #2:  dropped over 35% in 24 hours.  Decided to recharge my 245 to 100% and restart it, and now it's behaving normally, i.e., < 1% an hour.  I changed a few settings (including the "sensor update" I mentioned yesterday).  I will take a look at my latest settings and post here if anything seems noteworthy.

  • 0 over 5 years ago

    Also seeing faster battery drain on 3.9 compared with 3.7.

    Sensor update made no difference to this. Still draining quicker than it was before getting the 3.9 update. 

  • 0 over 5 years ago

    Came here for just this. Battery drains like crazy. At first I thought it was because of the updating process. Normally ~10% per 24h without activities. At the moment the first 10 percent is gone in 11 hours.

    I've read about Respiration Rate in this thread and will check to turn this off. Thanks

    Hopefully a fix comes fast.

  • 0 over 5 years ago

    Having checked it through the day I reckon mine is now draining about 2.5x as fast as before 3.9. 

  • 0 over 5 years ago

    Same issue, battery drain rate went from 0.54%/h to 0.87%/h sins 3.9. I bought this watch mainly because it could last 7 days. So long for that.

    I got Garmin will fix this, or at least give us the possibility to deactivate whatever is draining the battery. 

  • 0 over 5 years ago

    In case those of you with drain issues might have missed it, the 4.00 thread explicitly mentions the battery drain problem and an investigation to address it -- although, to be clear, the 4.00 update does not include a fix for it:

    https://forums.garmin.com/sports-fitness/running-multisport/f/forerunner-245-series/210763/forerunner-245-series-sw-4-00-is-now-live

  • 0 over 5 years ago

    I also had the battery drain problem since SW 3.90 (a bit more than 20% of battery each day without activity while it was 10-12% before) .
    Now i have changed my watch face to a Garmin one (Christmas), without heart rate, and I have a battery drain of a bit less than 10% each day, without activity. I had the NoFrills watch face before.

    I tought the battery drain problem could be linked to the new respiration rate but it's seems not as it still works.