Found a significant bug:

ARRRRRRGGGGHHHH!

This sync issue is driving me crazy!!! It happened again today. Doubled distance, doubled calories and missing hourly step and HR data. It's obvious that it's a sync/GC issue as the watch is showing the right data.



Does anyone else get the missing hourly step and HR data? When it occurs, it's always where the has been some tracked activities during that time.

I'm so sick of this crap!! Get you act together Garmin!!!

Does anyone else get the missing hourly step and HR data? When it occurs, it's always where the has been some tracked activities during that time.

I've found something like this before, see the below...



...with a max HR of 140 and the big hollow below the running man symbol. However here is the actual run, where the HR recorded just fine and a max HR of 168:



Out of these my steps and calories were mostly ok (i think), so no red flags were raised. Still this matches what you found, and i agree there can be processing issues on the GC side it seems.

Inspired by this thread i've looked into my own 235/GC calories a little closer and am similarly finding nonsensical estimates for anything outside of my running activities.

For example, in both Garmin Connect and on the watch (to the degree that i can see), today shows:

Total: 17177 steps; 16.24km; 1476 active calories
GPS run: 10726 steps (from ave spm*time); 11.05km; 755 calories

Simple subtraction tells me that outside of my run for the rest of the day i had 6421 steps for 5.19km and 721 active calories. The steps and distance seem reasonable given my activity level, but i apparently burned almost the same number of calories doing this as i did running 11km in an hour! Note that my HR graph across the day otherwise looks ok and never got above ~90BPM (besides my run and a single short spike up to ~160'ish BPM right after i woke up <- the culprit?!?).

I had never noticed the strange calorie counting before because i track calories in MyFitnessPal not GC, which takes the steps and activities from GC but calculates its own calorie estimate, which looks much more normal.

Certainly a bug in the system somewhere. Has Garmin acknowledged it and that they are working on a fix?

Inspired by this thread i've looked into my own 235/GC calories a little closer and am similarly finding nonsensical estimates for anything outside of my running activities.

For example, in both Garmin Connect and on the watch (to the degree that i can see), today shows:

Total: 17177 steps; 16.24km; 1476 active calories
GPS run: 10726 steps (from ave spm*time); 11.05km; 755 calories

Simple subtraction tells me that outside of my run for the rest of the day i had 6421 steps for 5.19km and 721 active calories. The steps and distance seem reasonable given my activity level, but i apparently burned almost the same number of calories doing this as i did running 11km in an hour! Note that my HR graph across the day otherwise looks ok and never got above ~90BPM (besides my run and a single short spike up to ~160'ish BPM right after i woke up <- the culprit?!?).

I had never noticed the strange calorie counting before because i track calories in MyFitnessPal not GC, which takes the steps and activities from GC but calculates its own calorie estimate, which looks much more normal.

Certainly a bug in the system somewhere. Has Garmin acknowledged it and that they are working on a fix?

Darren, I'm not saying that your figures are correct or not, but outside of specifically recorded activities can you accurately relate steps to calories? If wandering around the house doing chores the Garmin seems to miss a load of my steps as it apparently ignores a run of steps less that 10 to prevent false counting. But your HR will be over resting which could be adding calories.

Yesterday I ran 12.02 miles. Once again, the calories and distance were incorrect on the Activity tab.

The Steps widget for yesterday shows 2,330 calories and 14.8 miles for my 25,174 steps.


The Activities tab of the maximized Steps page shows 2,485 calories and 15.63 miles for those same 25,174 steps.


It's much more reasonable to believe that I walked around for 2.78 miles (14.8 total - 12.02 running) via my 6,352 Daily Activity steps rather than 3.61 miles. This number sometimes is way off and sometimes only slightly off. It's not an exact doubling. But every single day I have a run, it's off by some amount.

The same discrepancy can be found on the iphone app. Click Active Calories, go back to yesterday. It shows the same wrong 2,485. This is unfortunately what feeds into MFP if you have them linked. If I can't trust that number, it's kind of meaningless to use MFP.

Now click the circle that shows Steps, go back to yesterday. This shows the correct distance of 14.85 (carried out to the hundredth here) and correct calories of 2,330.

I hope everyone who reads this post will go back to their data from yesterday (or to a previous day where they had a Timed Activity), and see if they find the same inaccurate calorie and distance counts. I need to know if this is an isolated case or two, or, as I suspect, it is happening across the board and it's just hard to detect unless you know where to look.

I don't really pay much attention to calories so I hadn't looked at this before, but figured I would to give another data point for those of you who are trying to work this out.

For yesterday my GC stats say:
10.0 mile run/15418 steps/1004 cal
2.71 mile daily steps/5702 steps/203 active cal

I know from past experience/other devices that I get about 2100-2300 steps walking my dog ~1 mile so the steps seem to be pretty much on for non-activity tracking, and the calories for both the run and daily steps seem to be inline with what I'd expect.

Darren, I'm not saying that your figures are correct or not, but outside of specifically recorded activities can you accurately relate steps to calories? If wandering around the house doing chores the Garmin seems to miss a load of my steps as it apparently ignores a run of steps less that 10 to prevent false counting. But your HR will be over resting which could be adding calories.

I think it's a reasonable question. I know from my own experience, from tracking my calories for many years, and from using a Fitbit Charge HR for over 6 months, that yesterday was a low activity/steps and low calorie day, outside of my run. So the steps seem OK but the calories shouldn't anywhere near this high.

That said, here is the all-day HR graph...



...and yep, it looks like the 235 thought my HR was above well 100BPM for at least another hour after my run. That might explain the high calorie reading for the day.

If true, here is an example of where the low HRM sampling rate is going to significantly and negatively alter the numbers. If i was using these numbers for my daily calorie intake, i'd be WAY overeating!

I've previously defended the lower sampling rate for improved battery life arguing that it won't make much difference at the macro level (mostly for RHR). But Garmin needs to work this out.

TIM, do they have this message? In particular from a calorie point-of-view?

> Certainly a bug in the system somewhere. Has Garmin acknowledged it and that they are working on a fix?
> TIM, do they have this message? In particular from a calorie point-of-view?

I have certainly raised these calories inconsistencies with Garmin. It seems to be happening across various types of devices.

..and yep, it looks like the 235 thought my HR was above well 100BPM for at least another hour after my run. That might explain the high calorie reading for the day.

My heart rate graph was very erratic yesterday too with many spikes at the same level however before that HR data noise, I had already picked up (and posted at the time) that GC had picked up a distance from somewhere after my run which did not correlate from my casual daily steps by stride length but yet gave calories burn at my typical cal/step rate (like GailNestor gets consistently). It did the same error to me today.

If other type devices are seeing it too then it I suspect it is a GC issue.

It's much more reasonable to believe that I walked around for 2.78 miles (14.8 total - 12.02 running) via my 6,352 Daily Activity steps rather than 3.61 miles. This number sometimes is way off and sometimes only slightly off. It's not an exact doubling. But every single day I have a run, it's off by some amount.

Yep, that's what I've also concluded. On days where I haven't done any training (i.e. no tracked/timed activities), the dashboard widget and full page show consistent data. This also always correlates accurately with what the watch showed. On days where I have a tracked activities logged, they are always different. Some times by a little or sometimes a lot - i.e if the double distance/double calorie error occurs. The widget summary for distance, steps and total calories seems to always be plausable regardless of errors.

This is a basic and fundamental requirement of the watch/GC system and as such it should not be this inaccurate or inconsitent. It's not unreasonable for us to be annoyed by this and to expect it to work as marketed. I personally keep contacting (harrassing) Garmin about this just about every day where I've reconized major errors as these discussed in this thread. I would suggest all others do the same until Garmin get the picture that we are not satisfied with basic features not working and until issues are resolved.

I don't have any other systems linked to my account - No apple watch/health, no MFP, no strava NOTHING - just my FR235 watch and Garmin Connect. It's not unreasonable to expect tracked activites from throughout the day to be available to me with a level of accuracy that I can rely on. After all that's what I paid for.

The other thread complaining about all of us complaining about the issues with the watch - that annoys me to no end. All the other good stuff about the watch like CIQ become useless if the core features of the watch/GC don't work!