Severe battery drain Apple Watch series 5

Thanks! I'll see what happens!

That’s almost exactly my experience thus far. I’ve traded my 5 already, same experience with the new one👎🏽👎🏽

Yes I have reset a few times when you are impaired and repaired did you restore from a backup?

Same situation here, almost exactly. Down to only 10% power by 9 pm every day. This is twice the rate of drain that my Watch 4 experienced. Not good.

I have a mixed experience - prior to WatchOS 6 I had a Series 4 (Cellular + GPS) which would end the day with ~75% battery remaining after 18 hours of use including a 1 hr workout which was phenomenal. I used the Infograph (black) face, on silent, brightness set to minimum and smallest text size. After updating to WatchOS 6 I used the Meridian (black) face and found my daily battery would end at ~40% with no change in usage.

Last week I bit the bullet and upgraded to a Series 5 (Cellular + GPS) for the always on experience and my wife is now using my Series 4. Both my wife and I are finding the battery life to be poor with the Series 5 having around 25% battery remaining after 18 hours and the Series 4 having around 40% (neither using Cellular during the above period). Last night I charged my watch up to 100% at midnight, turned on Theatre Mode and went to bed with my watch on and when I woke up at 7am I had 80% battery left so that was clearly not the fix (which means turning off "AOD" likely isn't either). It is now 7 hrs later and my watch is down to 60% battery which puts me on track for below 40% battery when I go to sleep.

There is currently a lot of conflicting information about the issue - some sources are saying it is largely limited to Cellular watches only, or the noise-detection complication on the watch face is the cause, or having the noise-detection complication active at all, AOD is draining the battery too fast (which doesn't explain the Series 4 having this issue), etc.

I've tried "set up as a new watch", hard reset, pair and unpair, etc. and I have not had any meaningful improvement. Looking at other comments on here it appears getting the watch replaced is unlikely to resolve the issue either (again, see previous mention of Series 4 as further support for this).

I'll continue to play around with disabling things sequentially and see if anything makes a meaningful improvement. Note that I have not installed the update which has just been released today.

I unfortunately forgot to include on the above - in my first post I had

topped up the charge at 7am from 80% to 95% so total drain from 7am to 2pm (7

hrs) was 35% as the battery was down to 60% at 2pm. At this point I turned off

active noise detection to see if that made any change. When I took my watch off

to charge at 9pm it was down to 35% which is still about twice as much battery

drain throughout the day compared to what my Series 4 had previously.

Last night (while charging) I updated to WatchOS 6.0.1, turned off raise

to wake (so my overnight usage should have been at a consistent 1hz refresh

rate at minimum brightness), turned off walkie-talkie and did a restart of my

phone and watch. After 7 hrs of sleep the watch battery was down to 85% (having

had lost 15%) during a theoretical minimal use window (i.e. no calls,

notifications, accelerometer, etc). This was still twice the comparative

overnight drain experienced from my Series 4 which was not promising.

I charged the watch back up to 100% at 7am before leaving for work and

am now at 84% at 10:30am which equates to 4.5% drain per hour of low demand

usage (driving, typing, standing). Best case scenario based on that rate of

usage will be having 35% battery remaining at 10pm when I get to charge it

again which doesn't take into account the 2 x 30 minute workouts I have planned

for today. Expected charge remaining taking into account the workouts looks to

be around 25% again which is what I had been tracking (see 2nd paragraph in

previous post above) prior to updating to 6.0.1, turning off noise detection,

turning off walkie-talkie, etc. As mentioned, this is about 40% worse battery

life for the same usage than I was seeing on my series 4 with WatchOS 5 so as a

result I'll be turning these features back on as they are not the cause it

appears. As mentioned previously, the same Series 4 watch is also seeing

noticeably worse battery life after updating to WatchOS 6 also.

On a related note, some WatchOS 6.1 beta testers have advised that the

6.1 software update appears to address their battery draining issues which is a

promising sign but proceed at your own risk given no news on the public release

date of 6.1.

If anyone is interested, I have spreadsheeted my battery performance as per the following breakdown. Both my previous S4 and current S5 are 44mm Aluminium GPS + Cellular. Prior to WatchOS 6.# on my Series 4 I would charge my watch to 100% at around 10pm and then put it on charge the following night when it was down to around 70% and it would be back to 100% within 30 or so minutes. Following WatchOS 6.# I am needing to do a top up charge in the morning to 100% to avoid low power mode instead of getting 48 hours on a single charge.

S4 WatchOS 5.3.1: After 24 hrs usage ~72% battery remaining. Average drain of 1.3% per hour (incl 60 min workout)

S4 WatchOS 6.0: After 24 hrs usage ~45% battery remaining. Average drain of 2.4% per hour (incl 60 min workout)

S5 WatchOS 6.0: After 24 hrs usage ~5% battery remaining. Average drain of 4.3% per hour (incl 60 min workout)

S5 WatchOS 6.0.1: After 24 hrs usage ~25% battery remaining. Average drain of 3.2% per hour (incl 60 min workout)

Even with the bump provided by 6.0.1 I am still experiencing a 300% worse battery life on my Series 5 compared to my 1 year old Series 4. Waiting for WatchOS 6.1 at this point with limited optimism.

Hello

Thank you for your notes everyone.

Hard resets seem to help. However I just went for a 25 minute walk listening to music from the watch to my AirPods and the battery depleted by over 20%! Still not feeling good about battery life.

Guess what...the iOS update I got yesterday for my iPhone XS (13.1.3) seems to have TOTALLY sorted out my Watch problems. It seems the problem may have been the iOS update and NOT the WatchOS update (5.3.2 as 6 is not available yet for Gen 2 watches).

That would certainly ring true as my XS was running hot a lot for no apparent reason. Whatever it was doing drained the phone battery faster BUT was MOST DEVASTATING on my Gen 2 Watch battery!

It's been a week of having a barely usable watch...but now calmness has returned, it seems. After a full charge 5 hours ago, my watch is now sitting at 92% charge...just like normal. WHEW! What a RELIEF!

I hope this proves true for us all :-)