Battery life on Suunto 9 after Fall 2021 update

xdennisma

Hello,
I’ve had my Suunto 9 for several years and have always had excellent battery life out of it. I did a regular update in the fall of 2021, and ever since then the battery life when not in use has been terrible. I only use it for runs/exercise (about 30-60 minutes a day), and otherwise it sits on my shelf, yet the battery runs down by 15-20% per day. I have no media settings on and do not receive notifications on it. I need to charge my watch twice a week instead of once or twice a month.

I found several threads from August and September 2021 about a firmware update causing this issue, but do not see a solution amongst the thread replies. My watch is up to date for all updates. Am I missing something? Is there something I need to do to get back the regular battery life? Thanks!

surfboomerang

@xdennisma apparently this issue has been fixed in the upcoming firmware. Only Suunto knows when it will be released. So all we can do is wait

isazi

I can confirm that this is fixed in preproduction firmware. My guess is that there is not much to wait

surfboomerang

@isazi Small side step…
We know that the dual constellation selection like GPS + GLONASS/GALILEO affects battery estimation. Selecting GPS + Beidou however doesn’t. Is there indeed no battery impact by selecting Beidou or is it a bug?

dulko79

@isazi good things come to those who wait

Łukasz Szmigiel · S9PP 2.37.48

@surfboomerang I assume it’s because Beidou is less precise / faster to calculate.

isazi

@surfboomerang to my knowledge is not a bug, I am not sure why, maybe Beidou works on the same frequency as GPS.

Anyway the bug was on daily mode, not during activity, and the strange thing is that it was not affecting everyone equally: some people saw worse battery life than others.

surfboomerang

@isazi Yeah, I have to daily mode bug too which shortens the life of my S9P with roughly 25%.
But reading about battery bug, I remembered the behavior of the constellation selection. Hence the side step

Djordje S

@surfboomerang With one exercise per day battery drops around 25%……

Juan Ignacio Quesada Bustos

@isazi Speaking of problems with the firmware, do you know if the new firmware already corrects the error that when the alarm sounds the screen does not turn on and it is difficult to stop the beep? Since version 2.18.20 I have been observing this error, in versions previous ones did not happen.

Adam Gibson

@xdennisma Glad I’m not the only one with this issue. 90% of the reason I chose this watch was so I wouldn’t have to charge it every day.

xdennisma

Thank you everyone for the replies. I had called in to Suunto a couple of times to see if they had a solution, but hadn’t even acknowledged that this is a known problem. Based on the confirmation from several of you above, I’ll just be patient and wait for the firmware update. But this regular charging is certainly an annoyance, given that I was used to not having to charge my watch regularly. Thanks!

DMytro

@xdennisma you know, you can roll back to the previous firmware, right?
The downside would be that you lose your settings as if you did a hard reset.

xdennisma

@dmytro Interesting! No, I didn’t know that. My only relevant settings are stored on the Suunto App, so I could just re-sync and recover them. Where can I find instructions on how to roll back? I just did a quick web search and can’t find anything that looks reputable.