Battery drain - Karoo 2
Answered
Am I the only one who is experiencing extensive and irregular battery drainage on the Karoo 2, or at least according to the battery indicator. Today I rode for approximately 3½ hour where I started at about 81% and ended at 27%. Indicating a battery life between 6 and 7 hours, which is a long way from what is promised. Especially since brightness was set to 16%, I only had one ANT sensor and DI2 connected and wasn't using it for navigation.
Best regards Anders
-
I think that @Juan Fransisco said that for the battery drop to occur you should put the device on standby (Screen off) and not turn the device off. Today I put the device on standby and the battery had dropped by about 10% when I turned the screen back on however when i normally turn the device completely off no such drops occurs.
Am I the only one who has noticed that this thread has been marked as answered without any response from Hammerhead. Which to say the least is very disapointing as it seems that the cause of the problem is with the battery in some of the units. I believe it should be in their interest to resolve the issue, where they at least should try to engage in the discussion. -
Just got a Karoo 2 last week. First off the included mount broke simply while mounting it to my bars, so that was wonderful.
After two rides of minimal battery usage, today I rode for 3.5 hours and started with 83 percent battery. By the end of my ride it was at 11 percent.
This is really unacceptable and if it does not get a fix I’ll send the unit back, and go back to Garmin.
I ride 5+ hour rides a lot and I need the battery to be stable.
-
Well, I am no longer sure what's normal what not. After almost 4 months of usage and multiple cycles the battery behavior haven't got any better. Sadly, I returned my Karoo 2 and went back to Garmin (got myself Edge 1030 Plus instead). Hammerhead team was very supportive but they didn't have a solution to battery life
-
@Benno - I will definitely try that. However I have a century ride coming up this weekend and I won't be able to use it beforehand to test as I have two rest days today and tomorrow.
@Przemek - I am really worried about this problem myself. I like the functionality of the Karoo but it will mean nothing to me if battery life cannot support my use case.
-
@Przemek - no Di2 on my bike whatsoever - I have a Trek Emonda SL6 with Ultegra but no Di2.
I did another check this morning and the only sensors paired to my Karoo were the radar and light - and bluetooth on my phone.
I was super disappointed because now I'm going to have to switch back to my old Garmin for this weekend's event. I can't afford to be a beta tester at an important event.
-
@Chris - You should try the hard reset of the device. Since I did mine a couple weeks ago I haven't had any issues with rapid battery drain. Apparently it can clean out some old files that can mess with the way the K2 runs. I don't know if you sideloaded apps, but those could potentially cause drain too.
-
@Kevin - thanks for the tip, I'll try that. I haven't sideloaded apps, pretty much running it vanilla with only a couple sensors attached. The thing that really alarmed me was rapid drain even on battery save mode. I had it sitting for a bit with screen off and it drained 10 percent in 35 minutes, with the bike leaned up against my fence. Crazy times.
-
@Chris - I had a couple very similar experiences where drain was insanely fast like you. I did a 3.5 hour ride a few weeks ago and started at 75%+ battery. about 3 hours in I hit 20% and turned on battery save mode. Then in the last 30 minutes of that ride it died. Of course I couldn't tell since the display was off. I was pretty upset and posted about it in a different thread. Since the hard reset it's been great! Averaging about 10% per hour. I'd still like more, but most of the time that should be okay for me.
-
Karoo 2 has spent most of the day sat in the garden recording a "ride". Screen on map page and 100% brightness. It's not got a good GPS signal here so the map is constantly moving.
Approaching 7 hours now and battery just dropped below 50%.
So screen brightness has almost zero effect on battery life. Don't think Di2 has any impact. Stuff that destroyed the battery in my limited experience was live tracking and re-routing. Never tried it with bluetooth earphones. I guess Varia will have a small impact making it beep.
Temperature also has a big impact but I can't control that.
-
OK yesterday I ran into first issue - started a ride with 44% and after 2 hours it was completely depleted. First hour used ~12-15% and then last 30% was used in second hour. Granted - it was the first time I tried discharging the battery completely - usually I started a ride with 80-100%. Seems like K2's algorithm for showing battery % is a little wonky - when you start with a higher battery % it drains fairly slowly (6-8% per hour) and when you go belowe 40-45% it really accelerates. So I would have to revise my earlier test and would estimate battery life to be around 8-10 hrs (around 7 hr for the first 40-50% and then around 2-3 hours for the remaining). Still good enough for me but I would much rather have an accurate estimate throughout the whole battery life and not get the overly optimistic estimate in the beginning - IMHO ;) While at it I tried battery calibration (i.e. trying to turn K2 "ON" after it died until it didn't respond to the button at all - so totally out of juice and then plug it in and not touch it before it charges completely) - maybe it will help
-
@Przemek Maciolek this might be a bit late if you already returned your device, but you can invert the colors for better readability as you hoped like this: https://support.hammerhead.io/hc/en-us/articles/360041875274-Light-and-Dark-Modes
Worth mentioning that the Karoo screen does not use one of those display technologies where black pixels don't consume power, so you don't lose anything by changing the color scheme. Would kinda be nice if it did, since it would help with the battery life discussed here.
Please sign in to leave a comment.
Comments
43 comments