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vivoacticve 3 battery life issues

6677042

So they closed my other thread when garmin responded to tell me to reach out to my local service support.  My experience...thank you garmin, you are certainly not getting anything else from me.  after about 3 questions the service tech told me that they can exchange my watch for a 110 (USD) fee.  I already purchased this watch once, it's hardly 3 years old, so garmin insists that the only fix is to send me a refurbished VA3 for an extra $110.00?  Good god Garmin get it together!  Good luck to anyone else out there with the same issue.

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    Yep, the 7.70 ruined my watch. If I charge it fully, take it off charge and leave it on my desk it works for a week. If I wear it, the battery is dead in 3 hours. I've switched all functionality off on the watch but still no improvement in battery life when I put it on.

    The update lists improving Bluetooth connectivity so I can only think they're wound the power up to the max and it's killing the battery.

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    sam problems, closed also my topic.

    This problem is software! not hardware!

  • 0 in reply to Giorgio

    If the default response is to buy a refurb model; what a Garmin doing in the refurb that is different to the watches we already have? There must be some physical change to cope with the software update. Otherwise the new watch would fail just the same with the 7.70 update.

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    Personally i never have problems like this, Have it for 3 years now, it gets all updates, bluetooth is always on and it is recharged every 5 days or so. It is unlikely that batteries all of a sudden die of old age by the dozens after a firmware upgrade, so i guess it's not the battery itself that is the problem in most cases.

    Is a factory reset plus a full reinstall of the Connect app not fixing anything? I have been doing that a couple of times after a firmware update just to make sure everything is fresh again. Uninstall Connect app including all data, reset the watch and then reinstall the Connect app again and pair with watch again. That way all synced settings and whatever it exchanges is renewed.

    Don't forget to sync your workouts with the cloud first :)

  • 0 in reply to Sieds

    There's no suggestion that a software update has physically damaged my battery but something in it is causing more power to be used or for the watch to think more power is being used and it has messed up the capacity monitoring. 

    What I do know is that battery drain is way worse if I wear the watch so something in it is working a lot harder than it should when the watch moves.

    It's droped from 69% to 57% just typing this.

  • 0 in reply to 1435303

    Just for the comparision, i have the following software versions:
    Software: 7.80
    GPS: 2.50
    TSC: 2.10
    Sensor: 6.60
    WHR: 20.03.31
    Connect IQ: 3.1.9

  • 0 in reply to Sieds

    SW 7.80

    GPS 0.00

    TSC 2.10

    Sensor 6.63

    WHR 20.03.31

    Connect IQ 3.1.9

    I took my watch off when it hit 17% and now the battery is back up to 24% just sat on my desk. 

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    I really wonder what they do with these refurbished ones. Do they actually put new batteries inthere? I doubt it, these watches are all glued together. Very time consuming and thus expensive. They probably just clean, reset and test it. Maybe new band. Considering the fact that most of these watches are probably returned by others having some kind of issue, i wouldn't do it...

    Unless there are different hardware versions around as well, but haven't been able to find any info on that.

  • 0 in reply to Sieds

    Switching off the heart rate monitor seems to have stopped the battery drain.

  • 0 in reply to 1435303

    My 3 year old watch had the same problem this week.  The battery would not last  24 hrs and it typically would last 5 days.  Another forum mentioned this same issue after the SW update. 

    One user was able to resolve the battery drain issue by simply doing a hard reset of his device.  To complete a hard reset you need to hold the power button down for 15 seconds until the the unit screen goes blank and shuts down.  I just completed this and my watch my battery life is back to normal. Hopefully this fixes the elevation accuracy which also became super inaccurate after the update.

    I have now learned that turning off the device using the control menu screen is not a hard reset.  I will be doing a hard reset after each software update from now on.  I am not sure why Garmin has not directed their customers to do this in the forums.

    Good Luck.  Hard reset worked for me.