Race S: Extremely high battery use rate

André Faria

@withManish did also soft and hard reset, seems the same.

Mff73

@withManish said:

you will spend time reconfiguring the watch.

Soft reset is a restart and not requiring a reconfiguration. Even if not cool, it can refresh watch memory/cache/etc…

André Faria

For other watches people talk about a full cycle of discharge/charge, I will give it a try.

Miroslava

@André-Faria I went for a run in the forest today. I ran for 2 hours and 20 minutes and the battery only used 5%. It looks like it’s ok after the soft reset, let’s see.

OutdoorMan

Is this considered normal? Yesterday my wife went for a 5 hour hike with 100% battery and today she has 46% battery. In general the watch lasts only for 4 days max without any activities. It’s a bit frustrating to be honest.

Miroslava

@André-Faria but i have Race no Race S

VoiGAS

@OutdoorMan No way, the Race S should provide 25-30h without Navigation and about 20h with. Highest accuracy setting and AOD on. Maybe doing a full discharge / charge cycle helps

2b2bff

So, I charged my Race S about 68 hours ago - 19.08. 21:00. It is now at 33%.
Sleep tracking, 24/7 HR, AOD, notifications enabled that each vibrate.

2 tracked running activities with chest strap, in sum about 90min.

Is it amazing? No. Could it be better? Yes. Is it close to unsuable? Certainly not.

johann.fuehrer

@2b2bff I think it is the same as on my vertical 2. I need to soft reset immediately after EACH charging, then battery usage is ok. I already opened a ticket at Suunto helpdesk on this.

2b2bff

@johann.fuehrer will try to see if it makes any difference…

OutdoorMan

@VoiGAS said:

@OutdoorMan No way, the Race S should provide 25-30h without Navigation and about 20h with. Highest accuracy setting and AOD on. Maybe doing a full discharge / charge cycle helps

I don’t even remember when this started but with each update it’s getting worse. On top of that I have the feeling that the battery on my Race 2 is also not lasting long enough. It’s visible mostly outside of activities, during daily usage. Not during activities, which interesting.

withManish

@OutdoorMan said:

Not during activities, which interesting

Yes, your observation is right. I have mentioned somewhere that 2 hours of GPS activity use 6-8% of the battery.

André Faria

I am now paying more attention to the consumption, so I can try to find the root cause.
Is there any software that may help taking note?
So far during sleep it seems to consume more %, like 10% on one night.
HRV tracking enabled. blood oxygen disable
If it matters my watchface is the vector classic, all in white.
Airplane mode enabled. maybe a wild guess but I think this one could also impact since there were two features on " mobile notifications" (I don’t even know why they are on on the watch, I said no on the app) and “discovery” on connectivity (I don’t need it, since my watch is paired).

So far the watch is at 87% at 7:30am, it was charged from 0 to 100% at the end of yesterday morning, with 2h15 walk.

elbee

@André-Faria

Frequent reboots mitigates the problem. After a few weeks without reboots, my watch uses 15% per night (no aod, no sleeptracking so no hrv, no bloodexygen)

With reboots it’s about 5% or less.

So, clearly the problem is low quality software.

sindavide

2b2bff
For me is less than 4 days with 1 or 2 hrs activity/day, HR from chest steap, GPS ON 2/3 activities, HR 24/7. Guess concept of crap is subjective and relative. For me it is crap, and relative to previous FWs battery performance, now it is bad. Going backwards is not acceptable, may e for you it is, for me -and many others- it is not

@2b2bff

sunter

@elbee so we are waiting for software update.

elbee

@sunter

I doubt it.

About the Bluetooth problem, suunto support told me not to expect a fix from a firmware update very soon, if at all.

I don’t think suunto is actively looking into the battery drain problem.

And if I read how many crashes are reported with the latest race 2 /vertical 2 girmware, I just disabled auto update.

André Faria

@elbee said:

@sunter

I doubt it.

About the Bluetooth problem, suunto support told me not to expect a fix from a firmware update very soon, if at all.

I don’t think suunto is actively looking into the battery drain problem.

And if I read how many crashes are reported with the latest race 2 /vertical 2 girmware, I just disabled auto update.

Ahahha at least they don’t fake it . Kudos for them.

Elipsus

@André-Faria meeehhh, Suunto have been plagued with battery drain issues for years, and their fix are not always fixing anything.
my 9 peak pro can’t reach half of the (still promised on their website) 21 days battery life since at least 18 months, so without a real fix, the praise is yet to be made

André Faria

@Elipsus there is always a reason behind these things.
We don’t know how it was measured for their pub…also everyday software and specs evolves so maybe it has an impact.
Battery drain and crashes is something that I believe every brand is plagued nowadays…depending on model, firmware…and sometimes on some of them a reset just magically solves everything (my experience with garmin).

I want to believe that suunto, as everybrand do their best to fix this stuff, for sure in a “viable economical way”.
Not touching a 9 peak pro kinda doesn’t surprise me (even if I don’t like) but not touching/fixing a Race S would be a bit hard for them…

Let’s see what future brings for us…
Maybe we should contact support instead of talking here, this way they could “measure” the real number of affected people (Assuming it is not counted here).