Race S: Extremely high battery use rate
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Same problem here, charged last night 97% 24 hors later with two hors of trail running and map navigation. 63% I am having this issue since march.
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My suunto vertical also experiences this extreme drain. You won’t get much out of this forum other than people posting to say how great their watch is. This is a an issue suunto no doubt know about but are in denial about or don’t know how to fix.
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@gone-troppo I think reporting both cases is not wrong and may be helpful to further diagnosis. Last fw fixed my 20% drain per day.
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@snow said in Race S: Extremely high battery use rate:
. Last fw fixed my 20% drain per day
It might have fixed it for now just because the watch was restarted and the watch state was reset. It might reappear again. In the past I had this issue on and off. I suspect this issue is connected to external HR sensors but perhaps it is more complicated.
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In my case, with the Vertical 1 Titanium Solar, I’m confident the issues started with version 2.43.12 released in June 2025. I had been monitoring battery consumption, which increased from about 3% per day during normal use to around 7%. It’s not a dramatic spike, but it reduces battery life from roughly 21–22 days down to no more than 14–15 days.
Wouldn’t it be enough to check what changed between version 2.40.44 and 2.43.12? -
I recently disabled sleep tracking and it makes a huge difference on battery usage. Now with my usage (no aod, 7 - 10 hours gps usage a week) the battery last for over a week, were I used to charge it every 4 of 5 days.
I find sleeptracking not that useful so I don’t miss anything there.
What does puzzles me is that disabling sleep tracking also disables hrv. But that is also a minor loss. The day after a training hrv is lower and after a rest day it is higher. No surprises there.
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@elbee
Still, before the latest upgrade battery lasted substantially longer with sleep tracking enabled -
I have been reading this as I’m somehow very interested in the Race S. If I understand you, with the Q1, HR accuracy is somehow fixed but at the cost of very high battery life consumption.
With the new firmware, what is the estimation of battery life using dual band GNSS in activity?
I do ultra trail races but I’m thin with small wrists and the thing is I have tried my wife’s Run and I find that watch super comfortable. At the end, in the longest races I can somehow play a bit with powerbanks at aid stations when needed.
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I can only share my experiences with my race s.
Heartrate sensor isn’t great before or after the update. But I haven’t had any watch with great heartrate sensor. If the sensor in your current watch works for you, the one in the race s will probably do also. If your current watch doesn’t work for you, don’t have your hopes on an other watch. My experience is that it is more person related than watch.
Battery life is doable for a modern watch. During activities (with highest gnss settings, because I use maps during navigation) I use about 5% battery per hour. With my typical usage of 7 - 10 hours of running a week, I have to charge every 4 or 5 days. A bit better battery life than my previous garmin forerunner 965 but a lot worse than my watch before that, a forerunner 935 (well, before garmin added a nasty bug to it, and of course the 935 doesn’t have dual frequency gnss, which you don’t really need, no maps which is a nice to have, and mips which is the better choice for a sport watch)
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@elbee thank you so much for the very detailed answer. That 5% per hour with dual band and using maps is not that bad. It seems better than I thought. I understand that before the update battery life was more similar to the numbers Suunto says.
