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Sudden, Inexplicable Battery Drain on FR 255?

Nalorin
11 months ago

I bought a Forerunner 255 about a month ago (my Amazon return window literally closed yesterday). I've been loving it due to its exceptional battery life and its sunlight-readable transflective display. I spent a week tweaking it to just how I liked it, and it had been working swimmingly for about 2 weeks since then.

--> I haven't changed any settings since I got it setup how I like it, about 3 weeks ago. <--

I use the GPS feature 2-3 times/week when I can get outside, for up to 90 minutes each time, and the battery was lasting 6-7 days, with 10-15% left over when I started each charge cycle. The battery would normally drop about 4-5% overnight and another 4-5% during the day. I had O2 and Heart Rate set to 24/7, and HRV set to overnight. If I didn't use the GPS at all, I suspect I could have gotten 10-12 days of life out of a full charge.

8 days ago, I had fully charged it again. Then, the next morning, I noticed that the battery had dropped by about 8%. By the afternoon, it had dropped another 10%. By the time that 5 days had passed (4 hours shy of 5 days, to be precise), my battery was at 3%, and I hadn't used the GPS that week at all (the weather was bad). I charged it fully again, and the battery declined in the same fashion.

Yesterday, evening (about 7 pm) I charged the watch fully, again. By 2 pm the next day (19 hours), the battery life had dropped by 28%. IN ONE DAY ~without~ GPS usage!!!

I've tried charging it again today, and let it sit on the charger for an additional hour (to trickle-charge). I put it back on my wrist 2 hours ago, and it's already down to 97% again. Before all of these issues, it would drop to maybe 94-96% overnight (about 10 hours) from a full charge. Now it's doing half of that in just 2 hours. That's about 2.5x faster battery draw!

Because I have not changed ANY settings in the past 3 weeks, I suspect that this behaviour is firmware related. Any suggestions on how to resolve it? The current firmware on the watch is 18.27

Disabling PulseOx, HR and HRV are not options, as I'm using the watch for tracking health metrics related to a chronic illness.

  • 0 10 months ago

    Same here on firmware 19.18. Garmin plz fix it ASAP. 

  • 0 10 months ago

    I've determined that my battery drain seems to occur after I use a "custom" activity profile. If I reboot the watch immediately after using such a profile, I don't seem to have the battery drain issue.

  • 0 10 months ago in reply to Nalorin

    It might be helpful if you can describe this more. Did you install a CIQ activity app?  Or do you mean you copied one of the built-in activities and edited it?  If the latter, maybe also figuring out which settings you changed would be a clue as to what feature is making the watch misbehave

  • 0 10 months ago in reply to 6125703

    By "custom" I mean I went on my watch to activities > add > other > other, and then gave it a custom name and customized the parameters tracked.

  • 0 10 months ago in reply to Nalorin

    I made an activity like that, called Gym. I use it for pretty much any indoor training like lifting weights, stretching, rowing machine, ski erg and so on. Anything about going to the gym except spinning and running class. I use it many times per week, but I see no abnormal battery drain.

  • 0 10 months ago

    I have the same problem. Support told me to disable pulse ox. Why bother even having it as a feature then?

    Opened a ticket but support told me the drain rate is normal. I have no idea what to do.

  • 0 10 months ago

    I'm also struggling with very high battery drain overnight since fw 19.18. I tried switching off the phone connection from the watch and also switching off bluetooth on the phone, but neither helped. On my battery app you can see that during day everything is fine, but during night battery usage increases a lot.

  • 0 10 months ago

    Come to think of it, unusually high battery drain also happened for me around the time the beta for the redesigned Connect app was taking place. Then it was fixed... and not it is broken again.