UKC

Hi Everyone

I'm interested to see how other members with Instinct solar's get on with the battery life.

I only have the single watch face with time of day, speed and distance. I have an additional widget with a compass but my battery seems to drop like a stone. 

It gives me 23 hrs on the display and within 20-30 mins it's saying 22 hours. The 23 hours would only last about 4 or 5. I've turned everything thing off including Bluetooth, heart rate, Is this common?. Normal watch use with the solar it hardly uses any battery.

I have the solar.  Not installed any widgets and get about 20 days on a full charge if not using GPS all the time. 

I'd say the compass is the issue. It does have a pre installed compass I think..basic version however.  

I've got the instinct solar 2, similar experience to Ross above. 

I have once had a fault occur where the watch froze during GPS tracking through a forest, I had to a hard restart, after which the battery life was less than 8 hours despite nothing extra being switched on (as far as I could tell). Another restart sorted it all out.

The solar panels on these things is tiny and pretty inefficient. It's also not pointed at the sun most of the time. Don't expect it to add much (any) life to the battery cf. a non-solar version.

I get around 20-25 days without GPS but the GPS hits the battery pretty hard. I've discovered a Battery save setting that you can change the satellite system used, by default it uses GLONASS but you can change it to GPS only which is supposed to reduce battery drain. 

They quote 16 hrs GPS usage but I probably get around 5-6 hrs 

My Instinct solar will give me about 2-3 days of hiking with GPS tracking and a bit of sun.  Without GPS it's weeks.  Sounds like yours has an issue.

I’d agree. I have the non-solar original Instinct and it was good for 10 hours of GPS the other day. 
If you look on the Garmin forums there are all sorts of bugs with these watches, including freezing up for no good reason and battery life problems requiring a replacement watch. I like mine nevertheless but it would be a bad idea to rely on it too much for navigation. 

Indeed.  I consider mine very much an emergency backup, especially considering it only has a breadcrumb trail for getting back to the start.

I've now actually bought a Fenix 6+ because it was on sale for silly money.  Should I double-watch now?  Haha