Suunto 9 Peak maximum battery life

[marcorossi]

Hello everyone,

I’d like to ask if someone knows what’s the maximum battery life of this sportwatch, where for “maximum” I mean the battery life when every “smart” functionality is disabled and the watch is working… just as a watch.
I’m one of those humans who hates the idea of having something else to charge other than the phone: I’ve read of people using the watch for one week, but not more. Anyone knows of better figures?
Thank you,

Marco

[isazi]

@marcorossi it always depends on how many activities you record. Without “smart” functions it lasts 10 days I would say, but the less you use GPS and record activities the less it will last. I can do 1 week with around 10 hours of activities recorded per week.

Edit: I think the last time I checked without activities recorded it would consume something like 6/7% per day.

[marcorossi]

@isazi said in Suunto 9 Peak maximum battery life:

Edit: I think the last time I checked without activities recorded it would consume something like 6/7% per day.

Thank you Isazi, these are the informations I was looking for.

[surfboomerang]

@isazi Is that with 24/7 monitoring and sleep on?
Mine drops approximately 3% per day without activities. Even with notifications enabled.

[isazi]

@surfboomerang said in Suunto 9 Peak maximum battery life:

@isazi Is that with 24/7 monitoring and sleep on?

Everything off, but it was the first day. I have not done a real battery experiment cause I wear my own S9P every day, and the testing one gets so many firmware updates testing the battery is pretty difficult

Anyway after two days consumption was 15% including 1 hour GPS run.

Mine drops approximately 3% per day without activities. Even with notifications enabled.

Nice, show some statistics here to help @marcorossi

[surfboomerang]

@isazi 46 hours since last full charge. 85% left at the moment.

Activities:
2 hours of windsurfing, 1 hour of running.

Settings:
GPS only (best performance), screen on. HR belt for running

Watch mode:
Notifications on
Sleep, 24/7 HR off
I’m not wearing the watch during the night

Depending on the number of activities, I normally do 12-14 days on a charge cycle

[surfboomerang]

Speaking about getting max battery life…

I have a HR belt paired to get accurate readings during cold weather runs. For warmer weather I use the OHR.

During windsurfing I disable the (O)HR because it is never accurate or the watch is worn over my wetsuit.
I noticed that if I disable the HR from the activity menu, the battery drain estimation does not change. In fact, the heart icon is still flashing. This is probably because it tries to find the HR belt as an alternative.
To stop that too. I have to also disable HR under “sensors” in the activity menu.

Now, if I don’t disable the last option will the watch try to find a belt during the whole activity (and thus affect battery life) or is there a timeout?

[isazi]

@surfboomerang I think it just tries to connect to an external sensor, but if it doesn’t find it that’s it. Haven’t tested it though, it’s just an assumption. But shouldn’t really affect battery life, Bluetooth tries to connect to phone, etc, anyway.

[Egika]

@surfboomerang I have just checked: With 79% battery I get a 22h estimation for a run with WHR and belt enabled. I do get 23h with both disabled (in the pre-start screen).

[surfboomerang]

@egika Correct. It is roughly an hour of extra battery life if you disable both.
In my case I have paired a sensor in the past. On activities I don’t want HR measurements, I disable OHR only but the watch keeps looking for the sensor. I was wondering if there is a timeout on that search or if the watch keeps searching during the whole activity.

In the last case I have to turn off OHR and Sensor HR before the start of every activity where I don’t want to record HR data.

[Egika]

@surfboomerang It seems as this will change with an upcoming firmware. So you can switch both HR measurements on or off individually for each sports mode. Should be good for your use case

[isazi]

A pretty nice trick to double battery life, in activities where you are not going to look at your watch anyway, is to have a custom battery mode with everything performance but screen off (to turn it on you press a button). Screen consumes much more than the HR/Bluetooth.

[surfboomerang]

@isazi True, saves about 10%

[marcorossi]

@surfboomerang said in Suunto 9 Peak maximum battery life:

Mine drops approximately 3% per day without activities. Even with notifications enabled.

Do you want me to buy this watch?
Because this is how you make me buy this watch

Thanks for the info @surfboomerang

[surfboomerang]

@marcorossi In case you have any doubts buying the watch, maybe this helps…

25hrs after my last battery level post the level dropped 4% (85% -> 81%)

[Simon]

@marcorossi
I’ve tested quite a lot around with battery life. First off, every watch may be a little different, especially when it comes to remaining time estimates of the watch.

The estimation looks like that for my watch:
Battery drops slower from 100% drown to around 85% (3-4% per day). After that, the drain rate seems to be faster down to around 35% (5-6% per day); below 35%, it seems to slow down again (3-4% per day). All together, I’d probably get around 18 days our of the watch - no smart functions enabled and energy saving mode enabled.

Energy saving mode doesn’t help much, so I don’t use that, because it disables the BT connection to the app.

But here’s a neat trick for you: If you really not using the watch for a while, you can turn it off completely. Battery drain is then nearly 0 and it will probably last for months, if not years. I’ve never noticed any drain there. The downside: After turning it back on, you should first let it sync with the app. Otherwise, the GPS lock will take forever when starting an activity. And you will need to re-calibrate the compass. The watch will ask for that automatically. Also, the time and date is reset, but it corrects itself within a minute or so - even without connection to the app. No idea how that magic is working :'-D

@isazi
Just out of curiosity: How IS that working? I can have BT disabled on my phone and the watch still fixes time and date after turning it back on.

[isazi]

@simon said in Suunto 9 Peak maximum battery life:

@isazi
Just out of curiosity: How IS that working? I can have BT disabled on my phone and the watch still fixes time and date after turning it back on.

Not sure. Either GPS or it stores that information somewhere before shutdown and restores it. I usually have it connected to the app so few seconds after turning on everything is back to normal.

[Simon]

@isazi GPS is a good idea, but unlikely. It fetches time/date too very fast and indoors. Yeah, maybe there’s a chip that keeps the time running while the watch is powered off. That wouldn’t consume a noticeable amount of energy …

[marcorossi]

@simon said in Suunto 9 Peak maximum battery life:

The estimation looks like that for my watch:
Battery drops slower from 100% drown to around 85% (3-4% per day). After that, the drain rate seems to be faster down to around 35% (5-6% per day); below 35%, it seems to slow down again (3-4% per day). All together, I’d probably get around 18 days our of the watch - no smart functions enabled and energy saving mode enabled.

Interesting, I expected a non-perfectly-constant discharge, even for a reasonably constant usage; on the other hand I did not expect that below a certain percentage the amount of charge used daily could decrease again.
All in all, I’d prefer to have an even better battery life (I’m currently using a Withings Steel HR Sport that I use in “nearly watch-only mode” and charge about every 4 weeks), but for a sportwatch as compact as the Peak 9, considering all the features that are available I think that 18 days is a very good result.

But here’s a neat trick for you: If you really not using the watch for a while, you can turn it off completely.

Well, battery life is important to me but this feels a little bit excessive: I prefer not to have a watch on my wrist and then ask the time to people around me
Just kidding, thank you for having shared your experience!

[isazi]

Charged the battery 8 days ago. In the meanwhile I accumulated almost 8 hours of GPS activity and 1:30h of indoor activities. Battery is at 14% and I’ll charge it again today.