Brand new Galaxy Watch 42mm, rapid battery drain

[Professor_Pink]

Hi there.

My girlfriend bought me the rose gold 42mm Galaxy Watch with LTE yesterday for my birthday. Out of the box, I do what I do with all my portable electronics, and let the battery drain to 0% before fully charging it. Now that it's at 100% and ready to go, I start customizing my watch, setting up notifications, changing watch faces, etc. Part of what drew me to the watch was the multi-day battery life, made even longer by the Wireless Powershare offered by my S10. Not even half an hour into messing with the watch, my battery had drained 7%.

Even now, after following other recommendations on this forum, I've dropped to 85% in a little under two hours, and that's after disabling pretty much every workout tracker on Samsung Health, going down to five app notifications, and putting my brightness to 3. My watch is LTE enabled, so I attempted to take it off Bluetooth, and it lost its charge even faster. As a card carrying nerd that uses Facebook for pretty much everything, I'm okay with these changes, but my battery is still dying. Out of the box, my watch came loaded with Tizen 4.0.0.1, which from what I understand is causing crazy battery decline. I'm going to post the exact details of my Watch, but I'm curious if anyone knows a reliable fix, or there's a way I can downgrade to 4.0.0.0 without rooting the watch and crossing any of Samsung's yellow tape. The watch is lovely, but there is no reason in my mind that my phone battery should decline at less than half the rate than my watch when it's running significantly more processes, especially if it's being marketed as 3-5 days on a charge. Thanks for your help.

Model #: SM-R815U

Serial #: R5AM308B9DB

Tizen 4.0.0.1

[HughD]

I've had my 42mm Galaxy watch for a week and I'd say the battery life you're experiencing is about right.  Mine lasts a day, usually getting down to 25% before I charge it overnight.  I use most of the functionality, I don't see the point of having this watch if I don't!  I think the battery life you're quoting is for the 46mm watch, which has a battery with nearly twice the capacity, but as long as you don't mind charging the watch each night the battery is fine on the 42mm version, which is also a much nicer size to wear.  There are options to reduce battery life, including a low power state, but that defeats the object unless you can't charge the watch.  I have the standard watch, but I've read that the LTE version drains the battery pretty quickly if you use that functionality.  In contrast, apparently, Bluetooth uses very little power.

[Mel_Messy]

My watch is three days old. I have gone from 100% power at 7am to 30 % power at 9.30am. If this keeps up, it is going back. 

[Cavke8899]

Hello to all,

Today i had a major battery drain on my 42mm galaxy watch, it lost 10% battery in 5 minutes. i reset my watch, but the same continued.

One thing i noticed, i did a reset on the watch and i did not select what notifications will be sent to the watch, all apps where selected.

When i disabled notifications and limited to only a few, the battery drain stoped...

Seems to me that the watch constantly monitors for notifications, ant the more apps are enabled, the monitoring it will be.

This solved my battery drain problem.

Cheers

[Setter14]

Same here regarding battery:  When I put my watch on the battery charger and leave it overnight, the 100% smiley face appears along with the 12 hour possibility on the watch face. This battery was never meant to last more than 12 hours, and at that, it usually doesn't.  I will check the notification limitation and lessen it to see if I gain more battery life (thanks replying Samsung member) .

[Eraknelo]

Old topic, but I had to reply.
PSA: Don't ever let li-ion batteries go below 20%. The process you describe with letting new electronics first discharge to 0 then charge to 100 will straight up kill the battery. You're first subjecting it to extremely low voltages, this causes damage. Then heating it up by charging the full battery from 0, this causes damage. Then straining it with the maximum voltage, this causes damage.
It may very well be the cause of your issues.

[Blackfish31]

Unfortunately I didnt use mine daily so I didnt realize how utterly pathetic the battery life was until after the warranty had expired. Over the first year I only used it 8-10 times, draining it as fully as I could before charging. By the time it was a year old I was lucky to get 5 hours and after a few more uses I'm down to about 2 hours. I cant return it and I cant use it. It's a paperweight.

[andreyco]

Yes, yes, yes!

First thing you should do out of the box with new electronics is charge to 100% without trying to use it.

Li-ion batteries like to be 50%-70% charged for the greatest longevity. Obviously this isn't practical, so we use the battery as needed. But draining to 0% as the first thing to do is a terrible idea. This should only be done as a periodic maintenance every few months to calibrate the software in whatever device you're using to know what 0% state of charge looks like before charging to 100% immideately after. Never leave a Li-ion battery at 0% or at 100% for long or you're going to have serious longevity issues with the battery.

[jimoneil]

I have an Active2 which ran for about 3 days without needing charging. Then one day it started draining to 10% in a few hours. I messed about with lots of settings till I found the culprit (in my case). It was auto-searching for WI-FI. This may have been set by me accidentally (most likely) or by a software upgrade. I set the WI-FI function off (it connects through my phone and Bluetooth).

So my solution if your phone battery is draining - check the wifi connection and switch it off. This may not work for everyone.

[NoobTube42]

Definitely the rapid battery drain has to do with some background sync process running out of control. I had this problem on my son's Gear S2 which was LTE enabled. I noticed when I was enabling its remote connection to my phone, as soon as we were not connected by bluetooth, his watch was draining super fast to the point that the watch was feeling hot on his wrist. After I disabled that remote connection still no real improvement until I also reset his watch.

I think it's possible the carrier may have some syncing rules that don't work too well with the Samsung account sync software. In my case I had to use (and pay for) my carrier's device location/control app to monitor my son's watch internet usage/location etc.

After all was set up "properly" with the remote connection to my Samsung account disabled, the watch battery miraculously started to hold it's charge 20 times longer...

Suggest to anyone to disable this remote connection feature by Samsung if you plan to use the watch away from the phone it's paired with. Bummer, but what can you do...

I hope this saves some people the headaches it gave me until I figured it out...