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How long does your 945 actually last / how often do you charge?

Marshallist
over 4 years ago

The battery seems to maintain well during GPS activities but otherwise, I'm losing 10%+ every day while doing nothing but tracking steps (and a further 5/6% during daily workouts). I have the default watch face, no smart notifications, no pulse ox, background light is the default, etc. but I still have terrible battery life. Wondering if I should try to return because this is certainly not the 14 days of battery life that was advertised. Even building in for marketing exaggeration, I don't get to 6 days. So...what kind of battery life do you all see? Thanks.

  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to e7andy

    I don't get anything close to this.

    I train about 10.5 hours a week (1.5 a day), music maybe 1-2 hours of that per week.  No spo2, always use external HRM and I don't wear the watch sleeping.


    I never take it past 4 days without having to recharge (if it's < 20% when i go to bed I charge it for next days use).  Long term average per the battery widget = .9% per hour.

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    I started tracking my battery consumption on the Fenix 3, since were so many discussions about the poor battery life and wanted to see for me self how it actually was. That habit survived the transition previous December to a 945, so I have now about a year's worth of data.

    For me the watch consumes on average 11,8 % per day, so I would get out 8,5 days of a fully charged watch.

    I have the standard watch face, basically no downloaded apps or widgets from the IQ store - bluetooth on 24/7, WiFi, optical pulse on but no pulse ox readings apart from manual ones and no music. I scroll through widgets and "play" around with the clock and menus occasionally. And I average 1 hour of activity every day.

  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to olni65

    That is almost what my theoretical calculation from the specification resulted in. The specifications doesn't say anything about the settings for bluetooth, wifi and optical pulse, but to reach the maximum battery time those should of course be turned off and that is probably what they have done...but it isn't much of a smartwatch without the phone connection...

  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to e7andy

    Håller med - skulle vara mycket sämre upplevelse då. Tänk att inte ha notifiering, väderprognos, etc.

  • Former Member
    0 Former Member over 4 years ago

    I used to track my battery usage and recording it in the calendar as a note on the day I charged it back to 80 percent. I would then use the watch until it was down to 30 percent and recharge and I was averaging about a week or so. After a few months of this I decided to stop checking/inputting the data as I was happy with the life I was getting and didn't want to be bothered with the data tracking.

    I use the watch to track my exercise and have bluetooth on only when in an activity and sometimes not then. Yesterday for example, during a hike with my dog, about 5 miles and almost 2 hours, I didn't enable bluetooth because I knew the phone would have no signal for most of the hike.

    Basic watch face and activities works for me and I'm very happy with the battery usage.

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    In terms of charging I simply plug it in every morning when I roll out of bed to go to bathroom for shower and stuff. It's generally enough to get back from 80% to 100% most morning. Similarly if I return from a couple of hours on the bike (I am NOT a racing cycling, more a commuter / slow rider) then the watch is down to 50% or so and I again plug it in while grabbing a shower, again adding about 20% so that "extra" 30-35% from my ride is taken care of.

    I have everything turned on and per second tracking.

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    Well, I only had the watch for around 3 weeks now but it's already doing some strange stuff. Normally when it's just sitting on my wrist (bluetooth off, oxy off, wifi off) I only have heart rate on. It will drain 0.2%-0.4% which is normal and I think how it should be. I had one instance first week when I was still using bluetooth, wifi and a different watch face the drain would go crazy to like 6-8%. I fixed that by charging the watch to 100% and removing all of that. Which is kinda stupid, that I cant use other watch faces but whatever. I want performance. 

    During my activitys I use GPS + GLONASS and in my experience I will always get 3%-5% drain. And I think that is how it should be. Except once and that was today when I was getting 12% drain in one hour. I have no idea why this happened but my watched drained from 15% that I had when I started to 0% in 1h 20min. I gotta say I am a bit dissapointed right now and why I opened the forums again. I just hope the watch won't do this anymore since the good battery is one of the reasons I payed that much for this watch. 

    Anyway, I will know more in time. Right now I can't go to the mountains cuz of covid stuff but once I go I will start doing my long hikes again (9-15h) and that is when I will really see how the watch performs. I want to use GPS + GLONASS + navigating a GPX map the whole hike. I gotta say I will be really dissapointed if it dies before 20h. Any idea what I can expect?

  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to Anže

    Anyone can develop a watchface. I haven't checked how it works but I guess anyone can write a bad one that drains the battery.

    If you don't update regularly through Garmin Express some larger updates will take long time to download to the watch and I believe that it will have an impact on the battery during that download period. Just my theory.