@Brad_Olwin thanks this is helpful. its a bit hard to find some of the more elevation oriented information on a variety of devices online…not very many of the user guides or forums or reviews really address it specifically enough, though this one is probably by far the best and most thorough place!
The suunto 9 BARO as it is called now seems to be a very good sports watch but it is not perfect. I recently spoke to the guy who wrote this suunto 9 Baro review and he was telling me that he loved it but he is still unconvinced with the apps. He loved the extended battery life and metrics. I am toying between buying this one of a Garmin 6X Pro. Lening more towards the suunto as I have an ambit 3 already and the 9 Baro looks like a solid watch all-round.
@surfboomerang said in Suunto 9 Baro quick discharge problem:
@surfboomerang said in Suunto 9 Baro quick discharge problem:
Too early to draw any conclusion, but I noticed similar behaviour with my S9. Mine is 1.5 years old now and the last couple of weeks I noticed that watch drain battery faster than it did before.
When I bought the watch I could almost do 12-14 days on a single charge with notifications on and a couple of hours of activity recording.
Now I can barely reach 7-8 days on a single charge with the same settings.
Due to a lot of factors and the fact that I didn’t record the draining process, I can’t conclude that it is a bad battery or the use of the watch changed over the last year.
I let it run out of battery now until it switches off and will then do a full recharge. I will monitor the battery use more closely to hope that I can make any conslusions.
I will keep you informed…
The test starts from today. I let my watch run all the way to 0% (charging icon) and recharged it to 100% at 15:00 today.
I will keep track of the battery drain every 24 hours and before and after activities. I will post the results once the watch is empty again. (hopefully more then 12 days from now )
Ok, so the results are in…
TL;DR:
It look like the battery life of my Suunto 9 Baro hasn’t deteriorated over the 1,5 years that I own it.
Even with regular activity it still gives me almost 11 days on a full charge.
Motivation:
I bought my Suunto 9 Baro 1,5 years ago. I never kept a good record of the battery drain, but in my mind I did around 11-13 days on a single charge. Lately I got the feeling that the charge cycle changed from 11-13 days to 7-9 days. Together with this topic on Suunto forum, I decided to keep track of the battery drain to see if my feeling was right and that my watch also suffers from battery deterioration.
Test setup:
The idea was to let the watch run totally out of juice before I would charge it to 100%. After that I would record the battery percentage every 24 hrs from the moment I disconnected the watch from the charger. I also decided to record the start and end battery level of every activity I recorded with the watch so I could distinguish the idle drain (watch mode) from the battery drain during an activity.
Watch settings:
I do use the bluetooth connection and notifications for some apps, but I don’t use 24/7 HR monitoring and sleeptracking.
The table below shows the watch settings that are responsible for the Idle battery drain in the results:
Activity settings:
During my test period I performed 2 types of activity: Running and Windsurfing
The table below shows the profile settings for the two activity types. Those settings are responsible for the Activity Battery drain in the results
Results:
On 17th of June 2020 at 15:00, I removed the watch from the charger after almost 4hrs of charging.
The days after I performed regular activity as the table below shows. The total battery drain over 24 hrs is split into the drain during an activity and the drain without an activity.
Conclusion:
As the results show I almost got 11 days on a single charge.
“Almost”, as I had to recharge the watch before it went completely to 0% because I needed it in an event that day. So I had to derive the last day from the results the days before.
Well…11 days, wasn’t that the bare minimum as when I bought the watch? True.
So had my battery life deteriorate over time? I don’t think so.
Because one thing change significantly the last few months in comparison with 1,5 years ago: The Corona virus.
The virus outbreak caused the closure of all team- and indoor sports in The Netherlands. I replaced a lot of days on which I normally did an indoor sport with running outside (which was still permitted).
This caused more activities with GPS per week thus a higher battery drain. If I see the battery drain for the average Running Activity, I think I would get around 2 days extra on a single charge if a did an indoor sport on some days.
So that brings me back to 13 days on a single charge if I had the same activity pattern as 1,5 years ago. That means I did not notice any battery deterioration over time.
@Dimitrios-Kanellopoulos said in Suunto 9 Discounts:
@Luís-Pinto said in Suunto 9 Discounts:
@Dimitrios-Kanellopoulos serious? Well in smartphones sometimes you have issues in seeing so is logic what you say, yes.
Yup. I just hate amoleds. Even cannot see my smartphone.
I run with the s7 in Greece with polarized glasses, couldn’t see a thing.
I have the same issue with my smartphone. That’s why the angle of the plane of polarization in LCDs matter. All LCDs should have it at 45° in smartphones and 90° in watch displays. How is it angled in the S7?
@silentvoyager yes i know what you mean. When I first got the watch (ambit3) i took the Garmin (watch i had before) with me for comparison. On good conditions 5sec and Garmin where both spot on. On bad conditions the 1sec made such a great track where the Garmin failed.
I think on 1 sec the gps is on permanently and can filter out ring signals quite well, where on 5 sec it struggles too like any other.
@Cuba1hr @Dimitrios-Kanellopoulos I think Polar simply looks at your heart rate distribution and uses established equations on fat/carbs as primary fuel source based on intensity.
The fun part is: if you rely on default heart rate zones set by Polar or yet another age-based formula, this number is probably off, and by a lot. You need to be below your aerobic threshold to use fat as a primary fuel and in a steady state activity. Go harder than necessary, or in an interval stop-go fashion, and you’ll be relying on alactic or anaerobic pathways.
Check out Uphill Athlete. They have multiple ways to test for aerobic and anaerobic thresholds. Once you have these, set your Suunto 9 heart rate zones based on their recommendation and do long runs or bike sessions (working up to 90-120 minutes a pop, longer sessions being really good at forcing your body to rely on fats and conserve carbs) below your aerobic threshold. That would build up an aerobic base and force all sorts of metabolism enhancing adaptations.
Between consistent exercise and clean, reasonable diet, you’d be in decent shape in no time.
The more research I did when deciding to get a running/hiking watch, the more it pushed me in the direction of deliberately getting one without built-in HR. My dainty and hairy wrists ultimately tilted me to the Spartan Ultra, and I don’t regret that decision at all. There was no sense for me to spring for an extra feature that would probably never work well on my wrist.
Ironically I’ve ended up using an optical HR monitor for workouts, and I have total trust in it now, but it’s worn against my upper arm on an elastic band. Optical HR can be very reliable; the problem is the wrist is pretty much the worst place to put a monitor, but that’s where watches have to be worn.
@Dimitrios-Kanellopoulos Just a small update/test after the latest firmware update:
I exported the FIT files of two moves from Runalyze and used GPXSee to analyze the fit files. The tool has 2 ways to calculate the speed: “By distance/time” or “Recorded by device”
Unfortunately the speed with GPS only didn’t improved very much after the latest firmware update if I calculate the speed by distance/time:
If I calculate the speed by “Recorded by device” it started to look a bit better:
The move with GPS+GLONASS however looks much cleaner if the speed is recorded by distance/time. Especially the second half
Is this because of a better/stronger signal if I combine GPS+GLONASS?
So it looks like the firmware update solved the speed wobble a little bit, but not quite like the Ambit 3 Peak. The speed spikes are also visible on the watch screen during the move, so it isn’t only the FIT file.
@Nick-Vlahandreas said in Problem of cumulative elevation gain:
I’ve just posted about a similar issue. My issue kicked in around the same time as these posts and still we have had no response from Suunto on a fix.
Where did you post it? Did you get any response from Suunto?
If you posted here I see your are getting responses and help. And you had one watch replacement.
Please, let’s write about truth and don’t let the emotions write thing like: still we have had no response from Suunto on a fix.
@Bulkan said in S9 Baro titanium not measuring VO2Max or fitness levels with 2.10.18 - is this a known problem?:
@ink357 is your weight correct in the watch? Check it out.
VO2max is related with weight.
That is Ok. I’m 73kgs to 1,8m
@NickK said in S9 v. 2.4.14 GPS performance and practical questions it raises:
@paradize He promised an in-depth review of the Apple Watch 4.
He did all of the previous versions without much fanfare because to this date, Apple Watch remains kind of a marginal player as far as athletic endeavors are concerned. It’s the big boys like Garmin, Suunto, and Polar who get special attention. First look, unboxing, hand on, in-depth…
Also, I suppose the fact that Apple doesn’t send him a device a month or two before the release has something to do with the lack of early articles too
Let’s wait and see what happens…
the same happened to me today with spartan WHR baro for the first time - I did several runs in this configuration without any problem. custom sport mode, h10 belt, feeling on and chosen. after choosing feeling it ends in saving… animation, buttons were vibrating. after half an hour I did 12s reset as I found that it will save my data, but the activity is lost. on top of it, suunto APP (testflight) was not able to push agps to watch, so I had to connect it to computer. I sent logs to suunto - log id: 405282518053323 @Dimitrios-Kanellopoulos I found on the forum you were asking for it…
