Suunto 9 Baro quick discharge problem

surfboomerang

@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.

hel790

I can confirm massive batter drain on Suunto 9 Baro and Baro Titanium after last update.
Keeping both devices with Power Saving on and Flight Mode on (basically the devices are inert), and untouched; they got 12% battery drain in just 2 days, where usually would only use 1%

isazi

@hel790 have you tried a soft reset? Mine does not behave this way, it uses 1% or less power per day when sitting untouched.

hel790

@isazi Will try and let you know Thanks

ollemelin

@hel790

How did it go? My S9B started draining some weeks ago. Yesterday i went to bed and left it on 50% battery. When I woke up it was totally drained.

I have not noticed anything special during activities.

hel790

@ollemelin Soft reset did the trick! Reset it 3 days ago at 94% found it this evening at 91%

fritzbt2013

@hel790 happy to hear. having this issue as well, with similar numbers. 6 to 9% a day. Unit is new so I never got a chance to see it’s behavior prior to firmware update. Already tried soft reset but will try again. My other older S9 baro is as expected, about 1% day before and after latest firmware.

Stefan Kersting

Got my S9B today and disappointed about the battery drain. No message push to the watch, background light 5%, daily HR and sleep tracking on. From 18:15 to 23:30 the battery drained 14 % from 79 to 65 %. Have the newest fw on my s9b. Did a soft start too. Bt on too.

sartoric

@Stefan-Kersting
Have you ever calibrated the battery or at least recharged it once ?

As said before , you can contact support, maybe you have a defective unit.

Brad_Olwin

@Stefan-Kersting said in Suunto 9 Baro quick discharge problem:

Got my S9B today and disappointed about the battery drain. No message push to the watch, background light 5%, daily HR and sleep tracking on. From 18:15 to 23:30 the battery drained 14 % from 79 to 65 %. Have the newest fw on my s9b. Did a soft start too. Bt on too.

Here is a recent test I did:
39h total time
24/7 HR
Standby on ~60% of the time
Sleep tracking on
30 min Indoor Exercise
1.5h outdoor; GPS best; smartsensor
Mobile connected iOS
Battery 100% to 62%
At this rate would last ~62h

Stefan Kersting

@sartoric no, I did not recharge the battery was charged 78% when I got the watch. How do you calibrate the battery?

Stefan Kersting

@Brad_Olwin the standby time is estimated to 60% or did you measure it? so with all functions on and a little bit of training the battery lasts just 2,5 days per charge 🧐?

cosme.costa

@Stefan-Kersting said in Suunto 9 Baro quick discharge problem:

@Brad_Olwin the standby time is estimated to 60% or did you measure it? so with all functions on and a little bit of training the battery lasts just 2,5 days per charge 🧐?

Turn off sleep tracking, daily HR (this is the battery eater) and the backlight off and you will get your 8-10 days with around 4-6h performance GPS. Besides the battery meter is not proportional, I mean depending on the % you are seems the discharge is faster and then slows down, this I have seen it in a lot of devices with batteries. I would also wait a few charge-discharge cycles before take any conclusions.

sartoric

@Stefan-Kersting
full charge (let it connected for half an hour while at 99/100%)
full discharge (let it shut down)
full charge

Brad_Olwin

@cosmecosta said in Suunto 9 Baro quick discharge problem:

@Stefan-Kersting said in Suunto 9 Baro quick discharge problem:

@Brad_Olwin the standby time is estimated to 60% or did you measure it? so with all functions on and a little bit of training the battery lasts just 2,5 days per charge 🧐?

Turn off sleep tracking, daily HR (this is the battery eater) and the backlight off and you will get your 8-10 days with around 4-6h performance GPS. Besides the battery meter is not proportional, I mean depending on the % you are seems the discharge is faster and then slows down, this I have seen it in a lot of devices with batteries. I would also wait a few charge-discharge cycles before take any conclusions.

This is true, I had everything on and did a few exercises. The 24/7HR, continuous connection to mobile and sleep tracking take some toll on the battery. Without those or with just mobile connection the watch will go much longer.

Tomáš Lízl

Hello everyone,

I would like to know your battery life, or compare if the way my battery is draining is standard (before I possibly contact support).
In the settings below I have a battery level of 20% after 4 days (approx 120 hours). During these 2 days I didn’t measure any activity, thus only drove in smartwatch mode.

list itemBrightness - Low
list itemBacklight off, Standby mode off
list itemBluetooth - active incl. notifications from phone
list itemHR on wrist - on 24/7
list itemSleep tracking - on
list itemDo Not Disturb function - active 7h overnight
list itemWatchface - dark
list itemPower saving mode - off

I will add that the watch was purchased 14 days ago and updated to the latest firmware.
I have tried soft reset, but not hard one - I will try to perform.

What I just would like to know if the behaving is standard one, or should worry.

Thank you in advance for your feedback

isazi

@Tomáš-Lízl I think that the S9 with 24h HR and sleep enabled should get you to 5/6 days without activities, so more or less what you see now.

DMytro

@isazi nope, sleep+HR+1h of activity daily leads to 4.5 days for me.

Tomáš Lízl

@DMytro thank you for your opinions, I´ll ty calibrate batery and then eventually raise a claim