How long does Garmin Forerunner 955 battery last?

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Garmin Forerunner 955 comes with an extended life. On the smartwatch mode, the battery could last for up to 15 days.

For most people using the Forerunner 955 for activity tracking during the week, yo can expect the Forerunner 955 battery to last for up to 10 days. This fact is borne by many reddit users as well.

You could check multiple users opining about the battery life on this page on reddit.

The battery life does go down as the watch gets older and the battery becomes weaker. On a best case scenario, we expect the Garmin Forerunner 955 battery to last for 3 to 4 years.

In the event your Forerunner 955 is yielding lower battery backup, we do suggest following some of the steps below to improve battery life on your Garmin Forerunner 955 smartwatch.

How to improve battery life on Garmin Forerunner 955

The first step would be to ensure that you have the latest firmware on the Garmin Forerunner 955 smartwatch. In many cases, it has been observed that the battery drain may result from a patchy firmware update.

If you have the latest firmware on the Forerunner 955, we suggest trying to optimize the battery backup duration. There are a series of steps that you could undertake to augment battery backup provided by the Forerunner 955.

Optimize the screen settings

One of the most effective ways to enhancing battery life of Forerunner 955 would be to alter the screen settings. You can reduce the brightness or modify Backlit settings to conserve battery life.

You can alter the screen settings on a Garmin Forerunner 955 using the following options on the Forerunner 955:

  1. Hold the 3 bars on the watch display settings.
  2. Select System > Display.
  3. Select Large Fonts to increase the size of the text on the screen.
  4. Select an option:
    • Select During Activity.
    • Select General Use.
    • Select During Sleep.
  5. Select an option:
    • Select Brightness to set the brightness level of the screen.
    • Select Keys & Touch to turn on the screen for button presses and screen taps.
    • Select Alerts to turn on the screen for alerts.
    • Select Gesture to turn on the screen by raising and turning your arm to look at your wrist.
    • Select Timeout to set the length of time before the screen turns off.

You can use the Timeout setting to reduce the display timeout interval. This would directly help in augmenting the battery life.

Optimize GPS connectivity

GPS connection is one of the biggest users of the battery backup. So, optimizing the usage of GPS will bring significant improvements in the battery life.

We suggest keeping the GPS off when you do not need it.

So, keep the Satellite System settings to off when GPS is not in intended use. And, use the Ultratrac mode for GPS connectivity. The Ultratrac mode will provide GPS connectivity and optimize the battery usage.

To enable the Ultratrac mode on Forerunner 955, use the following instructions:

  • Hold the 3 bars to bring up the settings on the watch
  • Select Activities & Apps, select an activity, select the activity settings, and select Satellites.
  • Select the ‘Ultratrac’ setting. It would be the last option on the screen.

The Ultratrac mode conserves battery usage because it records track points and sensor data less frequently. Enabling the UltraTrac feature increases battery life but decreases the quality of recorded activities.

Turn off Bluetooth for phone connection

Bluetooth connectivity between the Forerunner 955 and smartwatch is a major consumer of battery. Disabling the Bluetooth connectivity will ensure that battery life improves by significant percentage points.

On a Forerunner 955, you can disable the Bluetooth connection with the paired smartphone using the instructions given below:

  • Hold LIGHT to view the controls menu.
  • Select Bluetooth status symbol to turn off the Bluetooth phone connection on your Forerunner® watch.

Turn off performance notifications

Another possible tweak would be to turn off performance notifications and conserver battery life of a Forerunner 955 smartwatch.

Some performance notifications appear upon completion of your activity. Some performance notifications appear during an activity or when you achieve a new performance measurement, such as a new VO2 max. estimate.

You can turn off the performance condition feature to avoid some of these notifications.

  1. Hold .
  2. Select System > Performance Condition.

Reduce notifications from the phone

The paired smartphone (Android or iPhone) sends notifications to the Forerunner 955. Reducing these notifications will conserve battery life. Here is how you can limit notifications received on the Garmin Forerunner 955 from the paired smartphone.

  • If you are using an iPhone®, go to the iOS® notifications settings to select the items to show on the watch.
  • If you are using an Android™ phone, from the Garmin Connect™ app, select Settings > Notifications.

These 5 steps are the significant steps that can be undertaken to boost battery life of a Forerunner 955 at any time. The best option, however, is to charge the watch for 15-20 minutes every day. You will never run out of the battery life on a Forerunner 955 with daily charging regime of 15 minute duration.