In this article, I want to show you a few tricks to save battery and charge your heart rate monitor correctly so that the battery performance is as long as possible. For all of us, as athletes and users of a heart rate watch, what we would never want to happen to us is to run out of battery in the middle of training or competition.
And surely it has happened to all of us at some time. It is frustrating to lose the references that the heart rate monitor is marking us in the middle of a race or not knowing how we have performed in today’s training. Although I cannot guarantee that this will not happen to you again, I hope that you will always have a battery for a while with the tips that you will see below. Notice! Do not be surprised if some of the advice seems to go exactly against what until now you thought was the right thing to do when managing a battery. Today’s battery technology and times have changed!
How to gain a longer battery life smartwatch?
From the clock’s menu, you will be able to make certain adjustments that will help to gain a longer battery life smartwatch. Surely you already knew some of them, but others may never have occurred to you and you can improve the autonomy of your watch.
TIP # 1: ONLY ACTIVATE GPS
The most current heart rate monitors are equipped with GNSS chips capable of interacting with different satellite positioning systems. The best known is GPS, the United States satellite system, but there are also GLONASS (Russia), Galileo (Europe), Beidou (China) or QZSS (Japan).
If your heart rate monitor equips several of them, you can normally choose which ones you want to be active and which ones are not. Although the more systems you use, the more accurate the data will be, this is not always the case and it also triggers battery consumption.
Therefore, my advice is to leave only the GPS active to minimize energy consumption. Do not forget that the GPS, along with the screen and optical sensor, is the great battery guzzlers in your watch.
TIP # 2: DISCONNECT ALL THE FUNCTIONS YOU DON’T NEED
Every day sports watches incorporate more functions: music playback, map navigation, the optical sensor to record keystrokes, Bluetooth, WiFi, payments via NFC, etc. This is great, but each of them eats a small part of the battery life, so only activate those you will use. There is no point in keeping functions or sensors that you don’t need active.
TIP # 3: ADJUST THE BRIGHTNESS LEVEL OF THE SCREEN
Remember that the screen consumes a large part of the battery life and if the brightness level is maximum. So ask yourself this question: do I need to push the screen brightness level to the max?
TIP # 4: HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE FOR YOUR SCREEN TO TURN OFF?
In many heart rate monitors, it is possible to configure the number of seconds that the screen remains on after pressing a button or activating the touch panel. Reduce that value to a sufficient time but as little as possible and you will lower energy consumption.
TIP # 5: REMOVE WIDGETS YOU DON’T USE
In some heart rate monitors, especially those with a certain tendency to also act as smartwatches, many widgets are already built into the watch. They tell us the weather forecast, the status of ski slopes, personalized calendars or a thousand other things. If we are not going to use it, they give extra work to the processor and uselessly consume our battery.
Through the mobile application, you can access widgets and remove the ones you don’t use from the clock. Keep only what is useful to you.
TIP # 6: USE A SINGLE DATA SCREEN
If possible, try to collect all the data that you consider essential in a single screen on your watch. If you succeed, you will avoid that during workouts, the clock is constantly rolling screens. Although minimal, it is easily avoidable energy consumption.
TIP # 7: DISCONTINUE MOBILE NOTIFICATIONS ON YOUR WATCH
Many sports watches already allow you to receive notifications on your mobile. It can be useful at certain times, but it is another source of unnecessary battery consumption. Do you need to receive notifications from all the applications on your mobile? If you delete them all or leave only the necessary ones, you will increase your device’s autonomy.
TIP # 8: USE THE INTELLIGENT BATTERY MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS OF YOUR WATCH
Many models already incorporate a specific function to take care of your battery, which allows you to choose the type of consumption you want the watch to do. These options enable or disable certain functions and decrease the frequency with which the GPS collects data, varying between 1 and 60 seconds, depending on the option chosen.
This way, we get to extend battery life during training. Even the best systems allow us to switch from one option to another with the training already started if we see that we are going to run out of energy with the current model.
TIP # 9: DON’T LET THE BATTERY GO TO 0%
Yes, I know they used to say it was good, but it was another type of battery. Nowadays, it does not improve the durability of the battery, but it worsens its performance, so you know!
TIP # 10: AS LONG AS YOU CAN, KEEP THE BATTERY LEVEL BETWEEN 30% AND 80%
It is the area where these batteries give the best performance. You do not have to become a slave to your heart rate monitor and are always monitoring the battery level, but if you see that you are approaching 30% battery, it is time to charge it, do not hurry anymore.
TIP # 11: NEVER LEAVE THE WATCH CHARGING ALL NIGHT
Most heart rate watches need between 90 and 120 minutes to recover almost all their autonomy. If you leave it charging overnight, you will have the watch battery subjected to a continuous power input for an additional 6-7 hours that will affect its capacity.
TIP # 12: BETTER A LOT OF SHORT LOADS THAN A FEW LONG LOADS
It looks like a tongue twister, but it is very simple. If you are a little concerned about improving the heart rate monitor’s battery life, you should put it on charge when it approaches 30% battery and disconnect it when it approaches 80%.
TIP # 13: IF YOU ARE NOT GOING TO USE THE PULSOMETER FOR A LONG TIME, LEAVE IT AT HALF CHARGE
Lithium batteries are at their lowest wear level with a 50% charge, so that is the approximate point at which we should leave them if we put the heart rate monitor in a drawer for weeks.
TIP # 14: AVOID EXTREME TEMPERATURES
This type of battery reduces its performance drastically below 0 degrees and above 40 degrees Celsius. Although it may seem like extreme temperatures that you are never subjected to, it is not difficult for it to happen.
Avoid leaving the heart rate monitor outside at night in winter or having it in the summer. It is not difficult to reach those temperatures and we will be reducing its capacity.
Remember that lithium batteries inevitably lose capacity over time. It is estimated that when they carry about 400 charges, they will have lost 20% of their maximum capacity and, very importantly, this capacity is never recovered.