Real battery life

Also this - no way:

https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/garmin-forerunner-955-solar-review/

"My experience testing for the better part of two months has met or beat Garmin’s estimates above; I typically saw around 2% battery usage per hour of multi-band GPS tracking."

I use 2 CIQ things - for Run:

Run Multi (https://apps.garmin.com/en-US/apps/698dda7d-ebf9-4750-a065-8b876a3dd6c6) and Flipstone's Battery Info Field

For Bike/MTB:

No-Signal AK MTB (https://apps.garmin.com/en-US/apps/48980675-1252-42cc-8737-1a6141709d80) and Flipstone's Battery Info Field.

Watchface is Quatro, but it shouldn't matter during the activity and it has low refresh rate, none of the fields refresh under 1 minute.

Running without music for me is 6-8%, with music playback it is 11-12% per hour. I would say it meets your experience of 6% per hour. Your cycling experience is probably way of because of the BT connections. Probably more comparable to "Activity mode with GPS Only mode, wrist-based heart rate, and music playback" which has 10,5 hours battery life. You could figure it out by unselecting the external devices and measure battery life again.

i haven't done plain GPS in a while, but it was under 3%/hour. i typically use All Satellites and it burns a smidge over 3% per hour. on the few occasions i used Multiband, it was 5-6%/hour.

i'm using an ANT+ HRM and nothing else.

this is consistent throughout the different firmwares. i find Auto-Select uses more than All Satellites, so i've stuck to All Satellites and been very happy with instantaneous pace and tracking.

Typically my FR955 solar uses about 5% per hour (maybe a tiny bit less than that when it's sunny out) which is pretty much in line with Garmin's estimates. No backlight, no music, multiband GPS, with a Polar H10 connected via ANT+. It's been pretty consistent for the past 5 months.

I used SatIQ for the first few runs, but switched because I didn't notice a significant improvement in battery life, but mainly because the SatIQ tracks are noticeably coarser than the multiband tracks.

I don't have ANT+ HRM, but I guess bluetooth should consume less than wrist HR. Most of my run/bike activities are in not dense forest/open, clear sky roads. I will do the test in next couple of days/weeks like they stated/tested in the manual, maybe with new firmware.

Does anyone know if Flipstone Battery Info field has significant impact on battery life?

It shouldn't but actually never measured/checked... There;s hardly any redrawing, only thing is writing to the fit file but that also should be minimal.

Best is to put it on a screen which is not displayed all the time btw (saves battery wrt redrawing).

But I'll actually look at the code to check if it might be easily optimizable somehow ;)

Got back from biking. Wasn't sure if I will end up somewhere in the forest so I used Auto Select (All systems or GPS would also be fine)...so 19% in 2:30 (in fact 3:37 total with pauses) + battery drain after the activity (turned off sensors and put it in the airplane mode...activity not synced then). Had to do a "long press".

Must try All systems AND GPS only next time and without sensors and no pauses.

I am not sure why it had quite enough time with over 7% and then it stabilized at about 5,5%.

I did a marathon back in October so with FW version 13 I think? Including the warm up run I used 23% of battery in 4hrs including Multiband, Ant+ HRM Pro, live track and navigation and still connected to my phone and displaying a few messages. 

Yesterday I did a 4hr ride and with SatIQ, HRM and power meter ist used about 20% w/o navigation or live in track