Forerunner 945 Series SW 4.00 is now live

What do you consider normal battery drain?

I've normally gotten .7%/hr+ on both my current watch and a previous RevA that I returned/exchanged.  No Pulse OX and otherwise set for trying to optimize battery life.  This equates to about 6 days of use.  That's not "bad" per se but not the specs that I was sold on either.

When we went to FW 3.3 however, my average use plummeted down to .3%/hr which effectively doubled my battery life to 12+ days.  Finally, I was pleased with the battery I was sold on.  

But since FW 3.9/4.0, It's reverted back to the .7% rate again.  Nothing else has changed with regard to my apps or watch usage, etc.

Normal battery drain, for this watch and the 935 my wife had before it, was/is about 10% a day doing absolutely nothing.  Considering there are very few days that go by where either me or her aren't doing a GPS activity, it's hard to nail down exactly, but we've both seen the 10% on 3.9/4.0 pretty consistently lately because unfortunately I've been dealing with bronchitis lately so haven't ran.  So, what I consider normal is right in between what you were seeing... so about .5% an hour?  And I'm running everything full bore; Pulse Ox, Bluetooth, wrist turn light up, everything.  

Thanks.  That's actually very good considering you're running Pulse Ox.  I'm envious.

I've noticed an increased battery consumption after installing one of the latest updates. It was affecting both - a watch and my smartphone - the latter could not go into deep sleep mode (based on BatteryStats app reports). It looked "hanging" events (the ones constantly displayed in smartphone notification area) coursed a problem - once I've disabled notification push to the watch for  an app having notification like that battery life was better, but still not as good as it was on previous firmware versions.

Once I've disabled Bluetooth sync  there is no battery drain at all.

Xperia XZ1C, Android 9

because the RemoteSW contains the files for BT etc.
ANT/BLE/BT: 4.30 and sensor hub 2.70

Regarding Battery Life: I have SW 4.00  now on my my watch for several days. I had up to now increased battery life compared to 3.30 as many users are reporting. But today, my battery life increased a lot suddenly without changing anything on the watch. Luckily, my watchface Blink can optional measure the number of minutes per day in high power mode. With 3.30 I had typically values between 50 minutes and 100 minutes per day in high power mode. With 4.00 I have typically values per day between 100 and 150 minutes. A factor of 1,5 to 3, average 2. This would explain, why battery life isn't as good as with 3.30. But today at 9 am I had already a measured value of 407 minutes which means, the watch was since midnight almost entirely in high power mode. By the way, the value on the right hand side (125 minutes) in this picture was yesterday's value. 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/4vhgeoj0uhqzcg7/IMG_20200105_085641.jpg?dl=0

After doing a hard reset the problem was gone. Nevertheless, IMO it can't be a solution that the users detect themselve when the battery suddenly is drained much more than before and doing then a power cycle. Garmin-Blake: Do you still investigating in these issues on Garmin development side?

I forgot to mention that I yesterday charged at my PC and not as usual via wall plug 

Former Member thanks for the excellent post -- I wasn't aware of Blink so that's very helpful.  I have a question and a thought:

Question:  when you mentioned low/high power modes, I assume you meant the device as a whole.  However, from looking at the Blink documentation it could also mean the watch face modes (e.g., how frequently data like seconds are updated on the face).  Can you help me understand which one you meant and how you can tell the difference?

Second, I also noticed that the last Blink app update was in October, which theoretically means that some of the drain you are seeing is due to a conflict or incompatibility between the watch face and the last few Garmin FW updates.  Any thoughts on that theory?

Hi, Garmin differs between two modes during displaying a watchface: a high power mode and a low power mode. in high power mode the screen is refreshed every second, in low power mode once a minute. If you are performing a wrist turn, for example, the watch gets out of low power mode into high power mode for exactly 10 seconds before falling back to low power mode.

Some time ago Garmin introduced a partial screen update, so that developers can implement things like seconds. In partial screen update mode only a portion of your screen is updated by the GPU to save power. The main power hog seems to be the refresh of the entire screen (the GPU). The higher the portion is, the more power is consumed. Blink is power optimized like hell. If you use Blink, be awarte that the default setting shows your minimum heart rate rather than the minutes in high power mode.

Nevermind.  I swear you all have jinxed me.    I have had SICK high battery drain just over the last couple days (20% a day vs 10%), and I have no idea why.  I don't know why mine was delayed vs. everyone else's, but it finally hit me too.  I'm going to restart and see if that takes care of the issue for now, but, mea culpa!