Battery life still sucks - 21.19

congrats on selling it and hopefully you can move forward and enjoy the new watch. I would like to hear your thoughts on thickness and comfort while sleeping. for me, the extra 1mm between the 935 and 955 is noticeable, so I'm not sure I'd want to move into the 15mm realm.

more good news on my battery front. I'm at 85% after 1.8 days. that includes the 50min run + 1 hour of strength training. that's 6.1%/day smart watch use (guesstimate...no worse than 6.6%) which is on the low side of what I've experience (still zero solar). I'm starting to feel better about FW21 and hoping that this Garmin Share switch did the trick to get me back my previous levels of use.

Hey all.

I had been experiencing terrible battery life with the latest firmware versions.

The best I could achieve was about 5 days, with 5 hours of GPS activities.

I was losing 8% or more per night.

I contacted customer service, and my watch was replaced.

I would recommend that anyone with similar issues contact Garmin.

They stated in older threads and confirmed in my customer support ticket that developers are not working on any battery issues.

Hi

Did you get a refurbed watch? / Brand new? or was it your own watch they returned to you?

They called it “recertified replacement”, which I imagine is a cooler name for refurbished.

As already written in a previous message to a friend of the forum, mine in 20.xx was also terrible, then by disabling the incident detection and simulating an activity without gps after a gps it improved a little, but still less than the initial duration when it was new, now in 21.19 magically everything is back to normal and it consumes 4% per day. When they don't know what to do they replace it with a used reconditioned watch. In 6 years of Garmin I understood that if you install third-party dials or applications you have to be lucky if the watch works as it should, with each update hard reset with a long press of the light button, I have never reset to the factory configuration

have you received the replacement yet? keep us posted on whether things get any better for you.

I can vouch that with limited data, 21.20 and a concurrent disabling of Garmin Share appears to have brought my 955 back into battery drain comparable to what I experienced with 19.18.

I'm at 3.8 days and consumed 42%.

in that time I've run 3 hours with All Satellites and significant backlight (running before dawn) : about 11% + a bunch of strength training also with significant backlight (3%)... so a rough guess would be 28% for that 3.8 days for smart watch use which is right in line with what I've had previously. I'm pretty optimistic I'm back to normal and can get a safe week of use before needing to recharge. this number will go up in the summer when I need less backlight and also get some solar boost.

Yes, I have the replacement with me since yesterday.

24hr using it but no workout: 4% drain with the same configuration of the old watch.

I have to test it for a while, but from 8% per night to 2% in the last one, I’m pretty confident that my older watch was defective.

My use is very basic: 24hr HR, no notifications, no music. Around 8 hours of indoor cycling and 5 hours of GPS running per week, with ANT+ sensors.

I don’t use any CIQ field/watchface/widget.

I'm glad the new watch is working well for you. 4% drain is excellent and what you should expect with you basic set up. did you have decent battery life at any point and was their a dramatic shift after one particular firmware?

it's really sort of crazy how people can have such dramatically different experiences with battery life on certain firmwares. I should note that having been on these forums for a decade (?) that's been true for all the Garmin watch groups I've been part of .