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Optical HRM not working, device sluggish and battery drain since update

Former Member
Former Member over 9 years ago
Since I've updated to 4.20, my HRM stopped working.
Also the device feels sluggish, when I click a button it takes over a second for it to respond.
Lastly, I've been experiencing battery drain.

All of this since the update. Anyone else experiencing the same?
  • Former Member
    0 Former Member over 9 years ago
    Same problem here. Weird thing is, it does read my heartrate: I only use the watch for running, so not as an activity tracker. Before a run, I put on my watch and it does show a heartrate. However, when I select the running activity, it loses the heartrate and shows the previously posted "No heartrate" screen. Yesterday I went on a run and it didn't pick up the heartrate for the entire activity, but after ending the activity and going back to the heart rate screen outside the activity (the one that's one down from the clock) it did show readings of the past hour or so, but it didn't show it during the activity and didn't link it to the activity.

    Maybe this helps in fixing it :)
  • 0 over 9 years ago
    HRM become a TOTAL DISASTER!!!
    https://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/1140392628

    ...I'm wondering if I can get my money back; seriously.
  • Former Member
    0 Former Member over 9 years ago
    Experiencing the same issues since 4.2 update.

    Sluggish to respond to top-right button pushes (Start/Stop).

    HR slow to establish and erratic.

    Battery draining far faster than it was before.

    Come on Garmin this requires immediate attention and rectification.

    Fabulous product before the update now missing my old 235!!
  • Former Member
    0 Former Member over 9 years ago
    What does this mean going forward??

    Same issues, but abnormally high HR spikes are also occurring during monitoring.

    There was obviously no regression testing done with the product prior to releasing this update. How do we trust updates going forward? It took just a few hours to notice all of these issues and now most of us have an unusable product because of a poorly tested update. If this takes the typical 2 months to fix, I'm done with Garmin.
  • 0 over 9 years ago
    HRM become a TOTAL DISASTER!!!
    https://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/1140392628

    ...I'm wondering if I can get my money back; seriously.


    FYI to everyone - if you want the HR to work at the start of your run, you MUST make sure the watch actually reads your HR ***BEFORE*** you start running. If you start without waiting for it to get calibrated to your HR, it will take forever for it to get a good fix and it will read 0s or other random crap until it finally catches on.

    Sometimes you may get lucky and it was already right around your HR when you started, and it will pick up faster. But that is just luck.
    Best way to check the HR is good is to go to the HR widget BEFORE YOU START, and wait until it gets a lock (when the heart stops flashing and the HR looks reasonable). Sometimes it takes a minute or two for me, especially if I had been moving around because I think it tries to guess a starting point for your HR based on your movement levels.
    However, by getting the HRM working before I start running, I have yet to have a single issue with the HRM during a run in the week+ since the latest update.

    edit: *I believe all of this was technically true before the latest update too, but before they defaulted everyone to 72bpm to start, which seemed to either mask how long it took to get a good reading or enabled it to get a good reading faster. I always had better success with the HR on runs if I went to the HR widget before starting, to make sure it had a valid HR reading first. It is probably debatable whether the current way or the "always start at 72bpm" way is better... the 72bpm thing was more noticeable which caused a lot of "bug" complaints, but I think it may have been more effective when trying to get the HR initialized than whatever method they're using now. IMO it should just drop all pretense of "knowing" your HR until it is actually locked on as denoted by when the heart icon stops flashing in the HR widget. All those other pre-calibrated numbers are just blowing smoke up your ass.
  • 0 over 9 years ago
    Same issues, but abnormally high HR spikes are also occurring during monitoring.

    There was obviously no regression testing done with the product prior to releasing this update. How do we trust updates going forward? It took just a few hours to notice all of these issues and now most of us have an unusable product because of a poorly tested update. If this takes the typical 2 months to fix, I'm done with Garmin.


    Mine works great now. I have had almost perfect HR readings for every run since the update.

    The only complaint I have is that they replaced the "72 HR bug" with the "seemingly random starting point HR bug" instead - there is the flashing heart icon that is supposed to mean that it's "working" on it, but when they put those useless pre-calibrated HR numbers on the screen too it's just messy. I guess when they put "--" while it tries to get a reading, everyone complains about that as well... so I don't know what they should do.
  • Former Member
    0 Former Member over 9 years ago
    FYI to everyone - if you want the HR to work at the start of your run, you MUST make sure the watch actually reads your HR ***BEFORE*** you start running. If you start without waiting for it to get calibrated to your HR, it will take forever for it to get a good fix and it will read 0s or other random crap until it finally catches on.

    Sometimes you may get lucky and it was already right around your HR when you started, and it will pick up faster. But that is just luck.
    Best way to check the HR is good is to go to the HR widget BEFORE YOU START, and wait until it gets a lock (when the heart stops flashing and the HR looks reasonable). Sometimes it takes a minute or two for me, especially if I had been moving around because I think it tries to guess a starting point for your HR based on your movement levels.
    However, by getting the HRM working before I start running, I have yet to have a single issue with the HRM during a run in the week+ since the latest update.

    edit: *I believe all of this was technically true before the latest update too, but before they defaulted everyone to 72bpm to start, which seemed to either mask how long it took to get a good reading or enabled it to get a good reading faster. I always had better success with the HR on runs if I went to the HR widget before starting, to make sure it had a valid HR reading first. It is probably debatable whether the current way or the "always start at 72bpm" way is better... the 72bpm thing was more noticeable which caused a lot of "bug" complaints, but I think it may have been more effective when trying to get the HR initialized than whatever method they're using now. IMO it should just drop all pretense of "knowing" your HR until it is actually locked on as denoted by when the heart icon stops flashing in the HR widget. All those other pre-calibrated numbers are just blowing smoke up your ass.


    I agree with you when you say you "MUST" make sure the watch is reading your HR before you start a run. I too have found this to be true. The problem, or should I say major problem is; no one should expect a watch that has 24/7 HR monitoring to have to "find" their HR before starting an activity. It's suppose to know your HR 24/7 already!!! You point out a great workaround until Garmin can fix this problem. It's a shame that people have to find workaround's for a device that should function properly.
  • 0 over 9 years ago
    The problem, or should I say major problem is; no one should expect a watch that has 24/7 HR monitoring to have to "find" their HR before starting an activity. It's suppose to know your HR 24/7 already!!!
    I, for one, do not expect a 24×7 monitoring device to be sampling a metric every second or even every minute, day and night, or stand ready to immediately report a reading of the current value (as opposed to the last known value that was read before I requested a report).

    “24×7” or “automatic” does not have to mean things happen whenever, or as often as, you like as the user or client. 24×7 can simply mean a process that has no scheduled downtime, without necessarily allowing you any say in the frequency of tasks within that process; automatic can simply mean something takes place in the absence of intervention or explicit request. Always think of ways in which you have no control over the mechanism while a marketing claim can still be logically true; your personal satisfaction (or mine) with something is not the first principle for defining words used by others.
  • 0 over 9 years ago
    FYI to everyone - if you want the HR to work at the start of your run, you MUST make sure the watch actually reads your HR ***BEFORE*** you start running. If you start without waiting for it to get calibrated to your HR, it will take forever for it to get a good fix and it will read 0s or other random crap until it finally catches on.

    Sometimes you may get lucky and it was already right around your HR when you started, and it will pick up faster. But that is just luck.
    Best way to check the HR is good is to go to the HR widget BEFORE YOU START, and wait until it gets a lock (when the heart stops flashing and the HR looks reasonable). Sometimes it takes a minute or two for me, especially if I had been moving around because I think it tries to guess a starting point for your HR based on your movement levels.
    However, by getting the HRM working before I start running, I have yet to have a single issue with the HRM during a run in the week+ since the latest update.

    edit: *I believe all of this was technically true before the latest update too, but before they defaulted everyone to 72bpm to start, which seemed to either mask how long it took to get a good reading or enabled it to get a good reading faster. I always had better success with the HR on runs if I went to the HR widget before starting, to make sure it had a valid HR reading first. It is probably debatable whether the current way or the "always start at 72bpm" way is better... the 72bpm thing was more noticeable which caused a lot of "bug" complaints, but I think it may have been more effective when trying to get the HR initialized than whatever method they're using now. IMO it should just drop all pretense of "knowing" your HR until it is actually locked on as denoted by when the heart icon stops flashing in the HR widget. All those other pre-calibrated numbers are just blowing smoke up your ass.


    Thanks for suggestion.
    I always use to check HR (via widget) before strating a run, but - I must be sincere - I never looked if the heart icon was flashing or not.
    I'm doing a test asap.

    Just now - small test while I was writing this post - I realized that the HR widget stopped flashing after 4 seconds I selected the widget, and gave me 52 beats (that looks a bit low, but possible).
    I'm wondering if this way to do the calibration is kept switching from the widget to the Run mode.

    Thanks again