Short battery life in the right pedal

Hi,

my right pedal (Vector 3) suffers from really short battery life, see the timeline below. I swapped the batteries in the right pedal *only*, no problems with the left pedal.

I measured voltage levels with a calibrated voltmeter device.

I describe the timeline and my analysis bellow, the format is <date> -- <description>:

Battery 1:

23.2. -- new battery in the right pedal, Nexcell CR1/3N, 3V
approx 3 indoor one hour sessions.
5.3. -- right pedal battery dead (1.81V, measured)

Battery 2: (with proper analysis)

New couple of Varta V13GA/LR44:
6.3. -- new batteries in the right pedal, 3.15V, measured
6.3. -- 1 hour indoor ride, room with temperature 21 degrees C, connect.garmin.com/.../6385145395
7.3. -- 2.88V
7.3. -- 1.5 hour outside ride, temperature 8 degrees C, connect.garmin.com/.../6390936596
8.3. -- 2.75V, bike in a room with temperature 15 degrees C
10.3. -- 2.60V -- moved bike to a room with temperature 21 degrees C
10.3. -- 1 hour indoor ride, connect.garmin.com/.../6408691324
10.3. -- after the ride 2.64V
11.3. -- 2.72V -- I believe that voltage increase is due to higher temperature.
11.3. -- 45 minutes indoor ride, connect.garmin.com/.../6424400765
13.3. -- 2.57V
13.3. -- 40 minutes indoor ride, connect.garmin.com/.../6424400953
15.3. -- 2.36V, batteries dead

EDIT: I use 920XT as a head unit. It seems that edit destroyed links to the activites :-/

I do appreciate any help.

0 fisherbike60 over 4 years ago

I experience same with my right pedal. I wonder if something is broken/wrong and the pedal therefore never goes to sleep/off? Have you got any update/help?

0 vladimirkadlec over 4 years ago in reply to fisherbike60

Hard to say what's wrong. It seems to me that the pedal never sleeps indeed. I tried to turn off the auto zero feature and third set of batteries. After one week they were gone :-(. So I unlinked the right pedal for now.

I sent an email to Garmin support two weeks ago, no reply. But they are pretty overloaded these days I think. Maybe my description was TL;DR :-), anyway I sent an additional mail with much shorter text.

0 vladimirkadlec over 4 years ago in reply to vladimirkadlec

FTR, I got an reply from the Garmin support team, they offered me to send the pedals for an inspection and price estimation of the repair. I'll probably do that but in a different part of the season as it would take 2-3 weeks.

0 jason106 over 4 years ago in reply to vladimirkadlec

how did u messure remaing battery life? did you hook up a resistor to messure voltage under load?

0 vladimirkadlec over 4 years ago in reply to jason106

I'm not sure, what do you mean by "remaining battery life". I put the battery in and after cca 10 days the right pedal is not paired anymore and the voltage levels are really low. If the question is how did I measured the voltage, I measured it without any load (i.e. without any resistor).

I try to pull out the battery after each ride now, for me it seems to be acceptable workaround for the season.

0 Luko79 over 4 years ago in reply to vladimirkadlec

You can read out battery voltage from the FIT file and the V3 too. The FIT file contains the voltage info usually for every sensors.(there is an online tool which can decompress the binary FIT file into a readable version and You can find the voltage infos in that. I can give You the link in private message, write me) You can read out the voltage, etc from V3 directly with an android mobile app called IPSensorMan, it works via ANT+ and BT too. I had a dual Vector in the past (V1, with old metal pod design), that had the same problem, one of the pod started to eat the battery. (Probably there was a short-circuit in this pod). My (temporarily) solution was that i removed the batteries from both pedals after each ride and put it back before next ride (but i always had to do angle setup calibration and it made me nervous...). After dozen months of suffering i bought a V1-V2 conversion kit with new pods and the problem was solved. But with V3 You can't replace the "radio part" (which eats the battery) unfortunately so You have only this 2 options: 1: remove the batteries after each ride and put them back before next one, 2: send the pedals back for replacement.