Suunto 7 Battery Life with Sleep Tracking, Daily HR, Body Resources

With the Suunto 7 now tracking real-time heart rate, body resources, and sleep, battery life is becoming even more of an issue. WearOS is famously battery-hungry.

This all made it seem like a good time to check how battery life was on an old Suunto 7 (which I have been using a lot ever since I got it – for beta-testing – back in September 2019) and a totally new Suunto 7 Titanium.

Here’s how that went – and in another post, I will discuss the tweaks I’ve been using to make the device work for me without any issues.

New Suunto 7 Battery Life

The new Suunto 7, used after I initially recharged it to 100% at night (see above image), lasted all through the next day and night.

By the look of the discharge graph, it would have lasted the second day and possibly a third night.

At the end of the trial graphed in the above image, I also went without recharging the device in the morning of the last day shown here.

A charge around 18% at night would have cut it a bit close, but should have lasted for the next night’s sleep tracking without issues.

The 1:30 run on day 5 above presents as a steep line (in red) in the graph; battery charge declined by 20% during this activity.

Nonetheless, the watch still ended up at 50% battery at the end of that day, and at 40% the next morning, after tracking sleep.

It would likely have gone until the end of that day before it really needed to be recharged.

Comparing Old and New Suunto 7

As you can see, when I was testing an old and a new Suunto 7 in parallel, I always had them on the charger long enough (and not lose so much battery during the day) that they were recharged to 100% before I went about my day.

Old but Not Obsolete

Comparing the new Suunto 7 Titanium with my oldest (1.5-year-old) Suunto 7, one can see that battery life has seen a bit of a decline, but it’s not bad (if inconsistent).

The old watch tended to have lost 10% more battery charge at the end of the day than the new one, but not always.

Sometimes, battery discharge was the same between the two watches. Only the one day, when I also went for a run, the old Suunto 7 took a hit from that and even afterwards (and continuing through the night).

Morning Recharge Habit

My habit – also see this post – has become to recharge the watch during the 30-60 minutes between waking up and having to go to work.

During that time, the Suunto 7 charges by at least 50% (in 30 minutes).

Between that and some tweaks, the Suunto 7 has been working beautifully for me and my uses for it.

Daily Battery Discharge

Between 6-7am and 10pm, using the watches mainly for interacting with notifications, playing around a bit with body resource tracking, and checking the sleep record, battery discharge was less than 50%.

That way, I ended up still having 50%-60% of battery when going to bed, leaving enough battery not just for sleep tracking but even for much of another day (should I not manage to recharge in the morning).

1.5-2 hours of training with best GPS recording, and the new Suunto 7 was still at 40% battery at night. (The old model probably encountered some issue there; the battery discharge it showed is unusually high.)

Of course, if you wanted to stream music from your Suunto 7, things would look much worse for you, battery-wise. Even if you just had an always-on display active, you’d see more of a decline in battery charge.

For my uses and with my use, I’m pretty happy with that performance.

4 responses

  1. Jeff Avatar
    Jeff

    Really good write up! I’ve often wondered how smart watches (aka Apple Watch) can track sleep when their charge is exhausted by night time. Suunto seem to have sorted out that issue well. The S7 is still a far nicer watch than the AW6 imho.

    1. As you’ll see in the next-up post, it’s both Suunto and what I’m doing with the watch…

  2. Jeff Avatar
    Jeff

    Now that I have my opwn Suunto 7 I’m loving it. It’s a fantastic watch. And following your tips on battery saving I find the watch is lasting almost 2 days between charging.

    1. I love to hear that! I was just wearing two other watches to get some comparison data… and then promptly went back to “only” the Suunto 7 because I just like it too much and want to wear just that!

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