Related
This discussion has been locked.
You can no longer post new replies to this discussion. If you have a question you can start a new discussion

battery life shorter than expected

peterdb
11 months ago

My watch is six months old. In my experience, the battery life is much shorter than documented. GPS mode is auto select. I do not listen music, have no special watch faces installed etc. According to the manual, battery life should be up to 22 hours with these settings. Yet, it seems rather 12 hours at most. For example, my longest run with the watch was six our hours and twenty minutes. Started at 100%, finished at 45%. 

Any settings that could impact this and that I am not aware of? What are the experiences of other users?

  • 0 11 months ago

    How often did your display dim up? How is the brightness set?

    22 hours is with only 25 gestures per hour. 9 alarms (vibrating/sound like Lap alert)

    I haven’t checked or measured the battery consumption until now, bit I noticed the gesture will activate

    sometimes during running even if you did not made the gesture. 

  • 0 11 months ago

    Mine is also close to 10% batteryuse per hour in running and biking activities. Gps in autoselect mode.

    And gesture detection is quite poor on garmins, it doesn’t work when you want  it to, but turns on the screen when it’s not needed.

    Had to use my old 935 with mips display for a while because garmin wanted to replace my 965 again, due to the many bugs I report. The 935 is a bit slow, but mips is a joy to use in an activity compared to amoled. And batterylife of a 7 year old 935 is only slughtly worse that a few months old 965.

  • 0 11 months ago in reply to AgentMax

    I checked the display settings and noticed the display always on during activity setting. I guess that that is the reason for the high battery consumption! Cannot remember I ever saw or changed that setting, I thought it was normal that the display was just always on while running, did not know I could turn that off!

    Thanks at least for pointing me to the display settings! Will do a few more long runs now, to see how battery life improves.

  • 0 11 months ago in reply to peterdb

    Let us know how that improved the battery life

  • 0 11 months ago in reply to peterdb

    Let's hope turning off always-on-display helps. At least on my watch the battery drops surprisingly little during GPS-based activities when the display is not always on (I don't have any percentages to give, since I don't have any battery meter widget installed currently).

  • 0 11 months ago in reply to peterdb

    It will surely improve the battery life, but the 22 hours from Garmin are with default display settings. Always on is the default setting. I will check on my long run on Sunday how much battery my watch is using. 

  • 0 11 months ago in reply to peterdb
    peterdb said:
    I checked the display settings and noticed the display always on during activity setting

    That is only since a recent firmware update.

    I do see a pattern. People complain about bad gesture detection during work outs. Garmin “fixes” the problem by turning on AOD.

    People complain that local weather on their watchs is some airport many, many miles away. Garmin “fixes” the problem by removing the weather location from the screen, so people are not aware anymore local weather is’t local at all.

    Garmins way of stopping people from complaining.

  • 0 11 months ago in reply to Bitti

    As promised:

    Did my long run today and startet with 99% battery level. 
    2:12:00 running time using always on display, multiband gps, display on full brightness, Stryd workout datafield with lot of vibrations and gestures to see if I’m in the required power zone. 
    Ended up with 89% battery left. 
    So that’s around 4,x% battery per hour. Will come out close to the 22 hours claimed by Garmin. 

  • 0 11 months ago in reply to AgentMax

    Yeah, that's not bad. But my problem was never with the activities, but rather the watchface or the "smartwatch" time

  • 0 11 months ago

    So, I turned off the always on display. Ran a long run: 4:07:00. Battery went from 98% to 74%. Extrapolating that would be 17 hours battery time.

    So, it is substantially better than with the always on display. But still much worse than the 22 hours.

    Display is on middle brightness. I have also turned off vibrations and audio prompts at turns.

    So, the question remains, why is my battery so bad, compared to e.g. AgentMax?