Suunto 7 sudden and rapid battery drain
-
I swear sometimes that technology is sentient. I have my first ever organised event this Saturday and my watch has decided today (Thursday) to start messing around. It knows!!
Actually, I think the problem started last night, but I only noticed it today.Yesterday was my final taper run before the event on Saturday, a gentle 5km around my local park. I have a new phone, a Pixel 6 Pro, which is pretty chonky, so I decided I wanted to run without taking it with me. I already had YouTube Music on my watch and downloaded a running playlist. All good so far. I connected my Aftershokz Aeorpex, like Iâve done before, and this was the first issue. The volume on the headphones wasnât working correctly. Both buttons would only turn the volume down. Not ideal.
So, I switched the headphones back to the phone and they worked perfectly. I was so relieved the headphones werenât broken I dodnât think any more of it.
The Watch was fully charged and I did my 5km gentle run with no issues. All is good. Run started around 1350 yesterday afternoon and lasted 34 minutes.
Evening went by, blah blah, went to bed, blah blah, woke up at 0730 and my watch was in battery saver mode. Uh oh, whatâs happened here??
I put it on charge immediately and charged it to full.By lunch time (1300 ish) it was down to 40%. UH OH!!! Did a restart and again charged it to full.
By 1800 it was down to 30%, OH S**T!!!I have done another restart, charged to full, uninstalled YouTube Music, and after roughly 10-15 minutes it has dropped from 100% down to 96%.
I am in mild panic now that it is not going to be working for Saturday
I am in the process of doing a full factory reset to see if that helps, itâs my last resort!!
Al that has changed recently are as follows:
-
On Tuesday I got my new phone. I used the same process I have before (using ADB) to transfer watch to new phone without having to do a full reset. All seemed to go ok.
-
On Wednesday I downloaded a playlist on YTM and connected my BT headphones. Both of these have been done before.
-
There are no other third party apps installed, all apps are up to date, and watch has always been connected to the phone.
I know I donât need my watch to complete this event, the route will be well marked and I can use my trusty Casio (see post on retro watches ) to time myself. But I love the data gathered from my Suunto watch and as this is my first ever proper event I really want to gather as much data as I can.
If anyone has any tips, advice, or simply words of encouragement I will take anything right now
-
-
Mine used to drain 10% per night /w theatre mode on, until last night when bt ate half of it during the night because it was updating some apps via bt. I have YT music, Spotify, MyFittnessPal, MyRadarPro, Flightradar24, compass, baro trend, hue essentials, keep notes, lunescope. I never had the battery drain feature help me find the offender.
It lasts all day if I donât fiddle with it. Recording activity with music burns 25% per hour. On a good day it lasts from 22h until 21h next day if workout is less than an hour. Sometimes I have to force stop YT music app to get it unstuck. Same with Spotify, I have powerbeats pro, iphone13pro, Face is Solstice AOD, no gestures, display timeout 10s.
-
@lexterm77 I typically get an easy 48 hours of battery life from 100% down to 5%, sometimes more.
This was not a typical situation, something went very screwy with the watch. I was losing 1% battery every 2-3 minutes.
Since the factory reset it has so far (touch wood) been behaving itself.
-
@olymay not sure what could have happened. If it is some process getting stuck it should be solved by a reboot, but it did not in your case.
-
@isazi that was my first thought too, that it was a stuck/stalled process or update. After 3 restarts I ruled that out.
It might be linked to the ADB workaround I used to swap phones without having to do a full reset. But this is the exact same process I have used in the past, and is the third time I have done it with this watch.
In hindsight I should have taken a bug report (or a few) but I was so worried about it not working for Saturday that is slipped my mind.
In positive news, I can report this morning that my S7 is still working as it should be, having lost >10% over night and the WearOS app battery graph on the phone telling me that with 80% battery it is estimated to last 1 day 22 hrs (I donât always believe that graph, but before I did the reset it was saying that at 70% the watch would last 2 hrs!!!)
-
@olymay said in Suunto 7 sudden and rapid battery drain:
ADB workaround I used to swap phones without having to do a full reset
Yay, I didnât know this. Thanks a lot for pointiing it out!
-
@g-q Itâs worked really well in the past, both with other watches and my S7, but I am wondering if it might have had something to do with my sudden battery drain.
It was either related to this, or YouTube Music. Either are very possible, but I have no intention of putting YTM back on my watch, or changing to a new phone any time soon.
-
@olymay long post - maybe I missed it: what does the Wearapp on the phone say about where the charge goes? Normally you should get information that shows the percentage each app has been using from the batteryâŚ
-
@egika great point and I should have included this.
Sadly, the WearOS app battery usage was as useful as a concrete parachute. It listed a few basic apps, (watch idle, system, OS, bluetooth, and maybe a couple of other). It did not list YTM.
And adding up the percentage of them all came nowhere close to the actual battery usage (even now the battery page adds up to 10% use but my watch it as 78%, so it should add up to 22%).
I can forgive a few percentage out, but when something was draining the battery in a matter of hours it didnât help at all. -
Someone make âtopâ app for wear os. Like on linux.
-
I can confirm that the watch is now running absolutely fine. It more than survived my trail half marathon at the weekend, with GPS on best and regular checks of the route and elevation screen.
It seems like the factory reset cleared whatever glitch was causing the battery drain.
-
My watch started to see rapid battery drain recently. Everything went back to normal once I uninstalled the YT Music app.
-
@aleksander-h I suspected the TYM app and this just adds to that.
I also found the Spotify app also chewed through battery.