Rapid battery draining issues since 18.27 update [FR965]

I've noticed considerable battery drain over the past few months of updates. Previously I was getting 20ish days worth of battery life. Now I'm lucky if I get two weeks. Going to uninstall as many CIQ apps as I can. I would say my usage is pretty typical of 6 days of timed activity around .5-1hr, no AOD, 1-2 hrs total of music during timed activities each week.

Also in the consumer product industry with Software/Firmware. I can say that once users start noticing something is wrong, it's worth looking into. When more than a few people notice that's probably an indication that there's some gremlins lurking in the code.

yeah, the problem is that only gremlins are lurking ion the code, and not Garmin's (programmers)

I've got a lot of empathy with developers. I work with them every day across the entire stack (FW, mobile, cloud). It's all hard and firmware in particular is uniquely hard because you need to make physical things like device hardware "do the thing". As consumers, we should have high expectations of the products we choose to spend our hard-earned money on. If a product is garbage, let's be critical of the product, not the people working tirelessly to make it as great as it can be. 

seems that 19.18 Firmaware it's not solving the issue

I'm a programmer as well, so I understand what you're talking about. I didn't say it's because of the programmers. I think it's more because of managers who only care about checking the list every quarter, adding some feature with a buzz-word, that nobody asked for or will use, rather than fixing bugs.

no, and I reset my watch yesterday.  overnight I still lost 20% and after a 1 hour walk this morning it's down 33% in total.  Very disappointed and not sure what to do next.  My watch is as out of the box as it can get - no apps, no music, no notifications from the phone.  I just use it for heath tracking.  

Ah, that's the state that according to the Garmin Customer Support we need to use it, so you should contact them at https://support.garmin.com/en-US/?contactOverride=true&productID=886725&tab=topics . I recommend you contact them by email (the button doesn't show up always, depending on the day of week, time of day) because then you'll know a bit better if/when they start to look at your case, as you'll get some response usually. If you report by chat it's more like /dev/null unfortunately. Please also update us here.

I have contacted them via email.  I tried earlier but no email button.. but like you said, must be due to the time of the day.   I checked my purchase date and if it's a 2 year warranty then it's still within that timeframe so hopefully that helps.  Will update here as and when I get any info from Garmin.  

Unfortunately as long as your watch "works" they won't replace it, and frankly as we all know the most probable cause of the battery drain is the recent firmware change, it wouldn't solve the problem. The even bigger problem is that they kind of behave like ostriches, they pretend the problem doesn't exist, and give us all kind of nonsense reasons (things that were the same for 10 months and worked fine, like: high number of installed CIQ items) and that if 1 get 7 days of battery time then it's very good and I should be happy, because she (the CS representative) also only gets 1 week. The fact that up to the night of the firmware update I had 2 weeks of battery time doesn't reach .... (I don't even know what to write here...) So in this case I'm not sure how much it matters if you have warranty...