How to Improve My Garmin Descent G1 Solar Series Battery Life

If you are charging your Descent G1 series watch more frequently than expected, it could be due to the amount of usage or settings being used. Below is a list of functions that could cause the battery to drain faster than anticipated, for instructions on enabling or disabling these, review your owner's manual.

Using Power Manager to Improve Battery Life

The Power Manager, featuring Battery Saver and Power Modes, allows you to customize and save key settings that affect battery consumption to improve battery life. If you are looking to get the most out of your watch's battery, start by looking into the Power Manager. To learn more about Power Manager, see -  Understanding and Using the Power Manager with Garmin Watches.

Functions That Use Additional Battery

• Backlight: Can be the biggest contributor to battery drain. How bright the backlight is set and how often it comes on can drain battery more quickly or less quickly. Having backlight set at 100% will drain a lot of battery while the backlight is on. The manual backlight setting uses the least energy, and some settings, like when the backlight comes on from a gesture, will drain more battery.
• GPS: Can potentially contribute to large battery drain, which is why GPS tracking is only activated during activities or navigation.
• Bluetooth: The drain created by Bluetooth is dependent on how many notifications come to the watch from phone, and how often the watch syncs with the phone. Occasional text notifications and use of other connected features will drain far less battery than continually receiving texts, answering the phone, running a music player, or getting weather updates.
• Vibration: Alerts that cause vibration or make sound use additional battery. Turning them off can extend the battery life of the watch.
• Pulse Ox and Sleep Pulse Ox: Turning on Pulse Ox and Sleep Pulse Ox (SPO2) will increase battery usage significantly. Turn these features off to conserve battery.

If battery drain still continues after making some settings changes, try resetting the watch to factory defaults and seeing how long the battery lasts without pairing it to the smartphone again. If the battery lasts like it used to, then the battery drain would be the result of the choice of customized settings on the watch, or Bluetooth connected features.