Garmin Edge Battery Life

[consularrider]

I thought we might have had some discussion on this earlier, but I can’t find it. The short story, my Edge 500 battery died during the Tour de Cure yesterday. It was fully charged as of Saturday evening and had been on for just under 10 hours. I was using it to both record the ride and to follow the course (shown by a line). The unit is almost four years old and only other time I had gotten a low battery warning was after the 2012 Total 200 as I was riding home, and the unit had been on for over 15 hours, but I was not using it to follow a course track.

Does anyone have any experience with this deterioation of batter life? Is it worth it to replace the battery, or should I just use this as an excuse to upgrade (too bad I missed the short lived special REI deal on the 800 bundle)? I’m signed up for the Total 200 in two weeks and don’t want to miss recording half of the ride. After all, I don’t get Strava credit for manually entered rides. :p

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[Tim Kelley]

@consularrider 88453 wrote:

Just a short update on my situation. I decided to just get a new Edge 500 as the cheapest option (got a good deal), since I don’t use a smartphone, several features on the 510 weren’t worth an extra $150. I also noted that the 500 claims an 18 hour battery life compared with 15 hours for the 510, 800, or 810.

On Saturday’s Total 200, I did not use the course routing function and the gps was on for just over 15 hours. When I plugged it in to recharge it still showed at least 25% battery life left.

For perspective, after 12 hours of course routing on Saturday on the Garmin 800 (which is coming up on it’s third year of hard use) and about 30 minutes of duracell usb pack recharge time, I was down to 15% battery life.

[Author]

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