How to make your Garmin battery last longer

Garmin's Power Manager is a powerful tool for those who want to gain complete control over their watch's battery life, with sensors and settings all able to be customized. 

Mastering the Power Manager section of your Garmin watch is essential if you're planning on multi-day tracking adventures, or if you just simply want to eke out as much battery life between charging cycles. 

Below, we'll run through everything you need to know about Power Manager and how you can use it to extend the life of your compatible watch.

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Battery Saver

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Battery Saver is a mode that does exactly what you would expect - a quick setting designed to provide maximum battery by tweaking settings relating to the backlight, connection to your phone and heart rate.

How to enable or disable Battery Saver

1. Hold the 'Up/Menu' button and scroll down to 'Settings'.

2. In this section, you should find 'Power Manager' - select it.

3. From here, tap 'Battery Saver' and tweak the switch to on or off.

Customizing Battery Saver

Following the same initial steps as detailed above should bring you to the option of choosing to 'Edit' the settings within Battery Saver. 

Here, you can tweak the settings of the watch face, music, phone connection status, Wi-Fi status, wrist heart rate, always-on display and brightness to your desired level. 

Of course, doing so will result in different battery estimates to the default Battery Saver settings.

Power Modes

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Not all Garmin watches are created equally, which means some of the following Power Modes aren't available unilaterally, but here's a quick rundown of the options that could be on offer.

Unlike Battery Saver, these different Power Modes are designed to help you continue tracking activity just a bit more efficiently.

Max Battery

The overkill option and great for multi-day events, 'Max Battery' turns off all customizable power features except GPS tracking. However, even this is set to the low-power UltraTrac mode to provide the longest possible time between charges.

Jacket Mode

Superb when you're using the watch to navigate but not necessarily record performance, Jacket Mode disables wrist heart rate but doesn't alter any other settings.

Extended

If you're out on an adventure in an area with solid GPS signal, Extended can be used to instruct the watch to only tap into GPS and no other satellite systems. No other settings are changed, however.

Max Accuracy

For those with Garmin watches that feature Multi-Band, the Max Accuracy profile can be used to instruct the watch to use all available satellite networks and dual frequency. No other settings are changed, though.

Available only on watches that feature Multi-band satellite connection, sets the watch to use all satellite networks and multi-band for the most accurate position tracking. Does not change any other settings.

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Customizing Power Modes

As you'll notice, these Power Modes often alter one setting significantly but leave others untouched. 

If you wish to tweak them a bit more to your specific activity, you can do so - just as with Battery Saver.

1. Hold the 'Up/Menu' button and scroll down to select 'Settings'.

2. Next, hit 'Power Manager' and then 'Power Modes'.

3. Select the Power Mode you wish to edit from.

4. Change the settings for each available option to your choosing.

Battery Alerts

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As you would expect, setting up battery alerts will allow you to keep an eye on your battery levels outside of the usual warnings when you hit the critical 5% battery life.

How to customize battery alerts

1. Hold the 'Up/Menu' button, scroll down to select 'Settings' and then 'Power Manager.'

2. Head to 'Battery Saver' and then scroll to 'Battery Saver Alert'.

3. Select when you would like to receive an alert from the list.