I can't get much more than about 2 days out of a fully charged battery, even with trying all the usual power saving tips. Battery discharge rates vary between about 1.8% and 2.5% per hr depending on what I'm doing. Today I tried deactivating the HRM and so far have averaged 0.5% per hr drain on the battery over 12 hr and expected approx 8 days life left in it. Seems then that the HRM takes a very heavy toll on the battery. Does anyone else have this issue? Any ideas on how to fix it? Or should I look to exchange it?
I have exactly the same issue. In my case when the wrist HR is on, besides the battery drain I have also BT connectivity loss. I think that the watch is trying to connect to the phone all the time and this increases the battery consumption.
I just turned my VA3 off and plugged it in to charge with 49% battery remaining after ca 3 days usage including: two ca 40 minute walks with GPS Activity tracking, a 8 story floor climbing activity, and BT turned on for syncing to my cellphone.
In case it matters, I have the screen set to short timeout & 10% backlight and have disabled the side-swipe feature.
SamC The battery life behavior you are describing above is the same I experienced with my second watch. First one bricked after three days when I loaded a watch face from Connect IQ, so I took it back. Second watch would only last 2 days unless I switched off HRM and then I could get ~6-7 days. I returned it and I am on my 3rd watch, which currently gets 6-7 days with normal (non-GPS) usage. This is with bluetooth on, HRM on, etc. more or less standard settings out of the box.
I chronicled my experiences and experiments with the 2nd watch in a previous thread which has a lot of detail over a number of days as I tried different things to obtain the stated battery life, or anything moderately close to it. Based on my experience I have no doubt it was a hardware issue so sorry to tell you this but if indeed you have the same issue, you most likely have a defective unit.
The HRM is the most battery consuming part of the watch. In former times, the GPS killed the battery. Now, you would almost not recognize the drain during a workout. Running for 2 hours -> 10% drain. 2 hours doing nothing -> 4%. But that is hard to compare, because the indicator is not linear. After a full charge, the VA will always consume 5% in the first half hour. Whatever I do! This commutes into a normal drain after a while and I can reach about 5 days with around 1 hour activity a day.
Due to the awful HR measurment I changed back to a HRM-strap during activities. As far as I can see, the drain goes down a bit.
Whatever, if you only reach 1-2 days, it seems that your battery is not right.
Cureforkeira I found the discussion you referred to and agree that I'm seeing the exact same problem - The HRM, specifically, is draining the battery a lot faster than it should. All the other usual power saving tips have a much smaller effect on the battery life. Reassuring to hear that exchanging the watch fixed this for you, pointing to a hardware glitch. I'm just within my 30day return window so I think I'll follow suit! Interestingly the HRM didn't seem to drain the battery nearly as fast when it was "sleeping" (ie green lights off). I sat it on the shelf overnight, with HRM enabled but not actively measuring and only lost about 5% over night. Maybe there's a "hot" LED or something that draws far more current than it should?!
I'm currently 51hrs in from a full charge and the battery is at 56%. I've done about 45mins of activities with GPS and HRM active, but otherwise had them both off. This is more like what I expected from the battery, but without having to faff about switching HRM off/on when needed.
Just to finish off the thread... I exchanged the watch a few days ago and the new unit is showing much better battery life already. From 100% on first charge I've gone 45hrs and am at 71% with HRM on (yay!) a custom watch face (Crystal), about 20min of GPS activity tracking, and BT off. Extrapolating this would give around 6 days' usage from a full charge, which is more like what I expected. It might even improve a bit after a few charge cycles.
