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High Battery Drain - Potential Workaround

Garmin-Blake
over 5 years ago

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. 

  • 0 over 5 years ago

    Discharged completely from 30% to „shut off“ in the night. I followed the procedure just before going to bed and all my GarminConnect data was lost even before midnight.

    1. I changed from Amazon (I have no more a valid account.) to my music.

    2. I made powered of the watch.

    3. I deleted the music widget on my watch, checked again that “my music” is the provider and made ones more a power off and restarted the watch.

    4. I was going to sleep with ~30% Battery.

    5. In the morning my watch was watch was off. When connecting to USB power I saw “loading maps” and after that 0 or 1% of Battery. Checking Carmin Mobile, I have no more data after 23:24 clock.

  • 0 over 5 years ago

    To be honest I have very little confidence in Garmin right now. They tell us to try this and try that, ask us if we notice after improvement after the 4.00 update although they said it does not address the battery issue etc. There is no clear explanation on what they believe is the root cause and why they think their instructions will fix it. Next they will ask us to stand on one leg, howl at the full moon and report back on the results lol.

  • 0 over 5 years ago in reply to Eric

    In spite of how current situation can be ridiculous, it can be explained by "Can not reproduce the issue" statement. If the issue can not be reproduced it is very hard to fix it.

    As I know, there is a three main workarounds to fix the not reproduced issue:
    1. Try to guess the issue, publish a fix and collect new stats. Garmin's way. Usually do not require a great effort and can be tested in public.
    2. Rollback everything to not affected version and do diff/analysis of further changes. Very complex and time consuming way, it require a great effort of the team. It can not be tested in public. However, battery drain issue started on different versions for different persons. It is not clear to what version it should be rolled back. To firmware 2.80, 2.70 or even 2.60 or bellow?
    3. Pick up an affected unit, which was replaced. After that Garmin can dubug the affected device and find a good fix. I think that this is best way in our case. However I don't know what Garmin do with replaced units - just destroy or send to lab for further debuging the root cause of the replacement. Also, it may that nobody replaced their watch just due to battery drain.

    Additionally, all we may experiencing the different battery drain issues which require different fixes. Also I do not exclude hardware issues.

    And the worst case is to lose the control under development. It can be the root issue too.

  • Former Member
    0 Former Member over 5 years ago
    Hello,
    I followed the procedure several times and today it is worse than usual 95% consumed in 5 hours.
    it becomes catastrophic like than an apple watch in consumption
  • 0 over 5 years ago in reply to Digeridoo

    Bug testing, you're talking about quality control and the lack of it out the gate. Had they hired QA testers during development (or hired more than they have), all of these bugs would have never been here.

    Instead, they're relying on customers to do it. And they are, they always have. I mean there's a brand new locked thread here about satellite lock on across multiple devices.

    Surprise everyone, all of those are using the new SONY GPS chipset that were having issues on other companies devices. Garmin stuck them on this gen of devices and are relying on paying customers to help them do their job!

  • 0 over 5 years ago

    with this workaround my battery drain doubled again, from 10% in 24 hours with 24 hours Spo2 measurement to 21% in 24 hours! Fearful

    and during the day OHR and Spo2 Measuremnt stopped for arround 2 hours!

  • 0 over 5 years ago

    Seems to be working for me, I changed music provider to “Control Phone”, powered watch off. Before the work around I was at 0.5%/hr, now it’s 0.1%/hr. It’s been about 24 hours since the change and I did 45 min run , no Pulse Ox on. 

  • 0 over 5 years ago

    Switching to Control Phone or My Music and do a power cycle does not change anything for me. Tried several times. The same doubled battery drain. If it helped someone, it means that we have several and different issues with battery drain.

  • 0 over 5 years ago in reply to rungel64

    0.1% is quite low value especially with 45 min run. Is your watch at >90% level or so? Discharging is not linear. Please post your measurements of battery level in next several days.

  • 0 over 5 years ago

    I, on the other hand, noticed that the battery consumption changes a lot in relation to the installed watchface. The original Garmin ones give me normal consumption (7% per day with BT and optical reader). Is it clear to you?