Race S: Extremely high battery use rate

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).

isazi

@André-Faria said:
If it matters my watchface is the vector classic, all in white.

If I remember correctly, that watchface consumes more battery than many others

Highlands

@isazi And it’s still the default watch face for V2. Glad I don’t like it and don’t use it.

André Faria

André-Faria said:

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.

2nd night, airplane mode off and mobile notifications off on the watch, discovery off. It was around 7% consumption. already a win.
Will try with airplane mode on tonight and mobile notifications off on the watch, discovery off.

André Faria

@isazi said:

@André-Faria said:
If it matters my watchface is the vector classic, all in white.

If I remember correctly, that watchface consumes more battery than many others

Thought/hoped that was fixed. it is my favourite one, kudos to the team for making it

isazi

@André-Faria not really sure if it is a bug, it simply uses many more pixels, and complications that are updated per second (seconds indicator, compass), so it is more resource heavy than many other watchfaces

elbee

My race s shutdown shortly after finishing a 7 hour hike (started at 48% and just before the finish went into a ultralow battery usage mode, registering next to nothing).

Since then I don’t have 15% battery loss per night and today’s hike used about 35% (default gnns, no aod, used maps with navigation). Which is okayish.

This leads to 2 possibilities.

Suunto firmware is suboptimal written. Suunto doesn’t do endurance tests with their firmware. The watch needs regular reboots to clear overfull memory/buffers/caches. Solution: suunto should optimize their code, look for memoryleaks etc.
The battery needs calibration. I do notice that after the forced shutdown, the watch has a hardtime charging to 100%. This could be caused by a reset of the battery management system and consequently a recalibration of the battery capacity. So, the 15% nightly battery loss could by a lot less due to misalignment and the battery not being charged to it’s full capacity.

Sure this is (educated) speculation and only suunto developers could say something about it.

But for now I plan to do more planned reboots abd maybe do a forced emptying of the battery now and then.

elbee

Hmm. Interesting. The watch is on the charger for over an hour but won’t charge beyond 91%

Edit: 1 hour more and it did charge to 100%

VoiGAS

@elbee Thats a sign for a battery management problem. Full cycle charging helped in my case

elbee

Ik got a reaction from suunto support. Part of it is

“ We would like to clarify that we have not yet received a large number of reports regarding this issue, therefore we cannot confirm whether it is a widespread software problem at this time.”

It could be that really not many people experience the problem or not many complain directly to suunto (suunto does not read the forum). Or their administration is a mess.

Either way, don’t expect a fix from suunto.

(Btw, after a restart caused by a complete empty battery, usage last night was 6%. Which is okayish. Don’t know if a reboot is enough or a depletion of the battery was needed)

André Faria

@elbee how did you contacted them?
and btw how you guy measure/observe/note the battery consumption? is there any tool, menu? or just by hand

elbee

@André-Faria

Send an email to support@suunto.com

There is no tool. Just look at battery percentage in the evening and in the morning. And just before an activity and when I finished one.

sunter

@elbee good point about Suunto not reading the forum.

We should definitely agree here that whenever any of us encounters a bug or issue, everyone submits a direct support ticket to Suunto. If they get flooded with multiple tickets for the same problem, they’ll actually have to address it.

2b2bff

@johann.fuehrer for me the soft reset after charging doesn’t help with battery run time. But it certainly helps with Resources. Will keep doing it…