Battery drain

[GKnoll]

Re software 2.50.26: During last week’s Spine Challenger North I found that, after maybe a day of continuous tracking, when I had the navigation screen showing the backlight would turn on, often at high intensity, if I apparently raised my wrist - but I had disabled this function under General Settings and confirmed this post-event. Wrist raises occurred often because of the terrain so the backlight kept turning on. This caused me great concern because of the obvious effect on battery life and the need for good navigation at night up on the mountains in bad weather.

I also note that if I select ‘endurance’ gps accuracy (that is, ‘good’ rather than ‘best’) only breadcrumb navigation is now available, whereas in the previous software version I could select outdoor mapping for navigation for ‘good’ gps (that, I found, is perfectly adequate for navigation in open countryside). Was this change a bug fix or was it to remove an apparently better battery life than the Vertical 2 in the good/endurance gps mode?

[duffman19]

@GKnoll There is a bug in the current software that causes the backlight to inadvertently activate when entering an activity. Several of us have posted about it in several locations ( here, here, here, and here), but have had no recognition of the issue.

[GKnoll]

@duffman19 Thank you, I’ll review the links you kindly provided.

[duffman19]

@GKnoll I created a separate topic for this here: https://forum.suunto.com/topic/14502/backlight-bug-2.50.26

Maybe you can post about your experience so it’ll gain some traction and attention from Suunto. It’s odd that they haven’t recognized this yet.

[franky23]

My Vertical titanium solar has battery draining from the biginning, more than two and half years ago. I don’t use notification from phone, but I use hr and sleep monitor. Of course backlight off and rise on low.
My best results with some firmware where 7-8% for 24 hours whitout activity, maximum with some activityes from fully charge to 5-6% was two weeks, sometimes 15 or 16 days.
Now after last two or three update I’m on 11- 12 days maxymum, about 8-9% per day. I tried everithing in the past: discharge till 0%, soft reset, soft reset pressing for a long period (also one minute), hard reset. Never changed.
After last update and this worst performance, I tried to recalibrate, but now it is impossible to totally discharge, because at 2% the watch enter in a safe mode and you have to wait many hours to drain the last enerergy, without can using it (before this energy saving mode I used to switch on the torch to quick discharge from 1% to 0).
Probably there are lucky and unlucky watch for battery…

[Mattg576]

@GKnoll How did your race go in that horrendous weather & did your Suunto last the distance (to keep the mods at bay for going off topic) ??

A friend of mine did the Challenger South & said it was some of the worst weather he’s experienced in this country, he finished in just over 53hrs

[Squirrel]

@franky23 You should have sent it for battery replacement at the beginning while under warranty. There certainly are faulty batteries with much smaller capacity than designed out there, or it could also be another hardware problem causing excessive power consumption.

[Matúš]

@duffman19 said in Battery drain:

Maybe you can post about your experience so it’ll gain some traction and attention from Suunto. It’s odd that they haven’t recognized this yet.

Maybe, they’re still deciding if taking this bug seriously or just replying “I’m not affected by this bug.”, just saying…

[franky23]

@Squirrel
You are probably right, but I asked to a firned of mine, tester for Suunto, and is opinion was that suunto probably would sent me back my watch without any change, because battery fault has to be very serious to have warranty replacement. Anyway, now I’m in late…

[GKnoll]

@Mattg576 Well, I got to the end in one piece! Yes, the weather was pretty awful at times up on the mountains. Freezing rain and black ice were additional hazards during the first night and one poor chap was limping badly as he came back into the village of Thwaite having slipped on the ice.

As a matter of course I put the watch on charge at each main checkpoint. I had no idea how bad the backlight issue was affecting battery life and did not want to risk losing navigation.

[Mattg576]

That’s a great achievement @GKnoll , well done mate .

I hope Suunto sort the backlight issue so you don’t need to worry about it when you undertake the full Spine next year

[Fenr1r]

Under 2.50.26, I notice that my overnight, off-wrist battery consumption approximately doubles (vs 2.46…)

My only change for the new FW was to enable North-up mapping.

2.50… did add the wifi weather updates (which do not work for me … could there be repetitive attempts by the watch to connect to wifi and the App that drain power?)

[thanasis]

There is still a battery drain issue.

Yesterday : leaving the watch next to my polar h10 (i forgot to remove the sensor from the strap and i usually use Suunto’s strap but i had to clean it this time so i used the h10…) , vertical 1 dropped from 85% to 55% overnight . …30% !!

One could argue about minor deviations of 1-2% difference or whatever being random observations/glitches or whatever , but this is a very strong indication that something is not OK. It is very hard to classify it as a hardware/battery degraded related because it’s not consinted against various changes in the setup . (E.g. removing HR , turning off , Bluetooth or removing WiFi , brings makes the watch operate in a rather expected long lasting way, even just wearing the watch overnight is a lot better than taking it off and leaving it on the bench with a Bluetooth/wifi device nearby ).

I know Vertical 2 , Race 2 etc are a lot fancier and great to talk about but this is device is still sold, (supposingly being) supported and is promoted as the top of the line for it’s long lasting battery etc. In my opinion… someone needs to look over it again because it seems there is something wrong here

[Dimitrios Kanellopoulos]

@thanasis if you left the watch facing down on the table that could have happened as it was using full power trying to detect ohr.

Was this the case ?

AGAIN: there is not active connection to a belt. Even if that was the case it does not burn so much.

If you hav 24/7 HR on and leave it on a table it will try to read HR and bump up the ohr readings. If that was not the case then some WIFI culprit is suspected.

[sartoric]

@Dimitrios-Kanellopoulos

so, ooc, if I left it on the table should I put it face up ?

[Dimitrios Kanellopoulos]

@sartoric yup

[sartoric]

@Dimitrios-Kanellopoulos
ok. because when I place it face down I don’t see led blinking while they blink (for a while) when it is face up

I have the loop strap so it’s almost always behind the sensor

[jjpaz]

@sartoric Be careful when placing your watch on any surface because, depending on the strap, the optical sensor might be activated due to the strap’s reflection…
This doesn’t happen to me with the black silicone strap, but it does with the others, including the Velcro ones.
And the optical sensor looking for heart rate is very battery consuming.

[sartoric]

@jjpaz
yep I know

most of the time I place it on its side

[Gunnar]

@sartoric said in Battery drain:

@Dimitrios-Kanellopoulos
ok. because when I place it face down I don’t see led blinking while they blink (for a while) when it is face up

I have the loop strap so it’s almost always behind the sensor

I have the same experience with race s. I always put it face down, no issues yet.