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Vivoactive 3 - GPS drains battery quickly.

gajhokies
over 2 years ago

I have found several battery drain threads, but I haven't anything exactly with my issues.  I can get about 4 - 5 days of battery life with normal use based on my setting, but if I use the GPS it drains significantly with one weird attribute. Case in point, yesterday I played golf for 3.5 hour and the watch started with about 98% battery life.  I received the low battery notification at about 3 hours.  Finished the round and the watch said I had 1% left.  Now the weird part, 20 minutes later it showed 7%, then about 10:00pm the watch showed 44% left.  If the low battery warning is accurate then I couldn't have gone more than another 30 minutes or so before the watch died, but then why did it go back up to 44% that evening?

  • 0 over 2 years ago

    The battery level measurement is based on the voltage, but when they get older they drop more when amperage is drawn from them. This could be the effect you are seeing, it still has charge when you are not using GPS, but when you do the voltage drops and you get the low battery warning. It can be related to cold conditions (although whilst wearing it it should be close to34-37 Celsius skin temperature). Its weird that you don't notice a reduced lifetime normally, so it might be related to a glitch in the battery itself. Sometimes the algorithm is doing something wrong (it probably has some way to adapt to battery spec spread) and it needs to be reset. You can try to hard reset the device when it is fully charged (leave it on a while after reaching 100% for good measure I would suggest) 

  • 0 over 2 years ago in reply to hhasert

    I will try the hard reset while fully charged, but I will say that the watch has died a couple time while using GPS with enough initial battery life that I was surprised it drained all the way to shut off.

  • 0 over 2 years ago in reply to gajhokies

    Not sure if it died or the low battery initiated a shutdown to protect it. You can try to hard reset either charged or discharged, but not while using GPS. It is a long shot of course since I don' t know the design or algorithm, but this is what I would try. Mine does about 8 hours on GPS, so 44% after 3.5 hours would still be ' normal'  if it would not throw the low battery.

  • 0 over 2 years ago in reply to hhasert

    I assume by "hard reset" that you mean power cycle?  If so, I have already done that.  But I can try again.

  • 0 over 2 years ago in reply to gajhokies

    It is holding the button until it shuts down (15 seconds or so). You keep all data it is a ' standard'  solution offered by Garmin whenever there is something wrong related to the device settings and such.

  • 0 over 2 years ago in reply to hhasert

    Ahh, OK.  All I have done previously is a standard power cycle.  I'll try the hard reset now.  Thanks.