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High Battery Drain - Potential Workaround

The below steps are meant to address complaints of increased battery drain that some have reported after recent updates. These steps may not work for 100% of users experiencing this, and for those of you please know we are continuing investigation into a permanent fix. 

Also, we understand that there are other threads on these topics and ask that users only respond to this post if you have attempted the below steps. Whether this works or not, we would like to hear that to aid us moving forward. Thank you all for your patience while we look into this. 

  1. From the Settings->Music menu, change the music provider to either “Control Phone” or “My Music”. Exit the settings menu to the main watch face.
  2. Power off the watch via the normal method, and then power the device back on. The battery drain should return to normal for the duration of the power cycle.
  3. If you prefer to use another music provider, please follow steps 1 and 2 before selecting your preferred music provider. 

If your device restarts for any reason, or if your battery consumption increases again, please repeat these steps. 

  • Thanks, I'm trying it now.

    FWIW, Amazon music has been sort of "borked" ever since the FW 3.3.  When I try to access it during a run, it doesn't automatically start my last played song.  No matter how many times I press "play" or "next",  I always have to go back into music providers and re-choose the playlist that was already chosen for it to actually play.  Not sure if that is related or not.

  • As someone that has never set up music, never even opened the music setting in the watch; it was set to Deezer. I don't even know what it is (I stream from Google play).

    Tried the steps, set music to "Control phone." And powered off. Trying it for the day and will try setting to "My Music" tomorrow for a contrast.

  • So far, in 2 hours, I am seeing .115%/hr battery drain.  I've never seen drain this low for this long.

    Granted, I haven't done an activity or even really dorked around with my watch much but this is a positive start.

  • i don't know what happened but after following above instructions and setting the watch to 'control phone', right now i'm getting from 0.6 / 0.7 -> 1.4% / h consumption (measurements from battery info widget) cc Former Member

  • Followed the steps, selected 'Control Phone' but no change in the last 2h (0.41%/day).

  • Update: Less than a hour has passed and this made it worse, exponentially worse. I've lost 3% battery by moving this (before was .826/hr).

    Alright, so what now? What do I do? Really need a solution here as the watch is hemorrhaging power now! 

  • Would you be able to try the steps again, but selecting My Music this time before power cycling? If that is still unsuccessful, we will need you to reach out to our support team at support.garmin.com for further escalation. 

    I'm sorry this hasn't resolved it for you. 

  • Former Member - my oppinion is that the garmin support is good for swapping watches and telling to use gps+glonass. or to do a hard reset. but for these kind of things you or an developer are more suitable. plus we're going to get an answer in...1-2 days from now?! really, the dev who came up with this 'solution' should step forward here on the forum and provide us a proper solution. otherwise we're just wasting time...

  • Well, see, I can't set it to "My Music" as I have never even touched this option on the watch, to begin with. I don't have a music track to share and pardon me here, but I frankly don't want to do anything else that might wake the bear. 

    The drain has not changed (now down 6% in around 3 hours) and my only answer I see here is to factory reset the watch and hope for the best. This is now the 3rd 945 I have after warranty swapping with support about a month ago. I don't want to send it back and wait for another one; unless you're going to have a Garmin Rep come to my door with a brand new watch.

  • Again, I apologize this hasn't worked. We have seen this be unsuccessful when users have switched the music provider without power cycling, but it doesn't sound like that's the case for you.