GPS Battery life: No way 13 hours!

Did u have GPS+GLONASS? I used to have GPS+GLONASS. Noticed heavy battery drain. Similar to yours. I switched to GPS only and battery life increased. a 3.25hr run of 21km with pauses drained about 30%. Still no where near 13hrs.

Some of the watch faces from Connect IQ drain the battery if you have sunset / sunrise times turned on in the watch settings while doing an activity as it's continuously looking for GPS.

sigmoidx , yes you are right. I do have GPS+GLONASS because the GPS signals are quite spotty where I live. 30% drain over a similar time sounds much better but still looks like you have literally coax every single minute possible out of it to last the 13 hours quoted.

Redmoonstar : I did see that when some watchfaces start showing gps tracking for indoor activities like the Line Watch face. I took out any location related stats from my watchfaces & just have standard - stairs, battery, calories, steps. only extra is probably the average heart rate but i chose average deliberately.

Overall I must admit thee battery life in VA3 has been a bit disappointing. I could go on for a whole week without charging my old VAHR...sigh..

Yeah i get nowhere near 13 hours - I think 7h is about the best I've achieved. And that was with:
- GPS only (no GLONASS)
- Backlight switched off
- HR Broadcast off
- Default watchface
- Smart Data recording on

I did a 20 minute run this morning which cost me 6% of battery. In theory this means 5.5 hours of running.
When I go on long trips I disable bluetooth and go back to the simplest watch face. This is annoying, but it helps.

I wanted to add two data points from this week. They are not apples to apples nor scientific, but show two different applications of the watch which each show that the battery life on the VA3 is very limited. I'm not sure that 2.7 FW really helped.

Sunday @8:30am
100% Charge
9 mile run

Monday
6 mile run

Tuesday
8 mile run

Wednesday @6pm
20% Charge
8 mile run.....died right after I saved.

Summary: 31 miles 4:35 hrs across 4.5 days


Friday @4:30pm
Updated FW 2.70
100% Charge
No run

Sat @6:40am
18mile Run, battery 18% remaining

Summary: 18 miles 2:40 hrs ~20-30% per hour

I've already noticed that 2.70 is draining my battery faster then 2.60. I did a full charge this morning and after 2 hrs of watching a basketball game on TV with Bluetooth off I'm down 5%. At this rate my watch will be dead after 40 hrs of doing nothing but showing the time and HR monitoring. A hard reset was no help.

I had exactly the same experience, my battery usage was pretty good on the 2.60 firmware, no GPS activities in the past week as it is pretty cold around here, but the battery was on pace to last the full promised 7 days. Ever since I upgrade to 2.70, it is draining much faster, down to 91% after 4 hours and one non-GPS treadmill run. I also did a full reset power off which lost my accumulated steps etc on the watch but didn't help with the power.

The FW update doesn't mention anything about power management, but something has definitely change. Not only is my battery drain faster then 2.60 did, but I was always able to charge my VA3 to 100% and have it read 100% once disconnected from the charger. Now I charge to 100% and as soon as I disconnect my battery reads 99%. I've tried this several times and it always reads 99%. This change alone suggest Garmin changed something.

Another update from me. Mine was also draining super fast after the 2.70 update, and full power off reset didn't help. I have a battery drain widget installed (3rd party) which was projecting less than a day left of battery life based on the drain rate after a full charge this morning. Funny thing though, the drain rate keeps slowing down to the point where now the same widget projects 3 days left at close to 6 pm, still not the full promised seven days but much better. Sure sounds like some kind of software glitch.