It rarely happens. I rarely forget my airpods at home, and when I do I usually turn around to get them. Yesterday I didn’t turn around. I went for my walk anyway. You might think “so what?” and you’d be right to. It doesn’t change much. I usually listen to podcasts and audiobooks, rather than music. I like my walks to be intellectually stimulating, as well as physically good for me.
Yesterday, out of curiousity I experimented. I charged both the Garmin Instinct Solar and the Garmin 45s with a solar panel. The first thing I noticed is that they were using 0.1 amps to charge, rather than 1, 2 or more amps of power. Until this experiment I had never considered how small batteries for gps watches are.
200 mah According to a Google search the battery capacity of GPS watches is around 200mah.
Today I began playing with Garmin Coach. I decided to try one of the running programs. It’s the first of January, first day of the year, and I have already been for two walks and a run. The run was a calibration run so I ran too fast and too hard so I burned out on the first task. I ran at 16km/h and 230 steps per minute for a short burst before tiring and slowing a bit.
One nuissance of most modern smart watches is that you must charge then once a day, once a week, or once a month. When you’re in Spain though, with a solar watch things change. At first you go from “26 days of battery remaining” to “36 days of battery remaining”, to “39 days remaining”. Before long the watch displays “infinity time remaining”. When you’re in watch the sun charges the batteries faster than normal use depletes the batteries.
I bought the Garmin Instinct Solar because I was interested to see how the Solar option works. As with most watches the solar panels take several hours to recharge the watch, even during summer heatwaves. The Solar part is great, if you’re in Spain and leave your watch to recharge in the sun while you do something else.
This leaving the watch alone for hours, as it charges, is a paradox, since other metrics cannot be tracked, rest, heart rate, steps.
I tracked the run and walk with the Garmin Instinct Solar. It is very easy to use while wearing gloves. You can stop the activity, change sport, start the activity, do the second sport, and then stop the tracking of the second sport, without taking off your gloves. Now that we’re in the cold part of Autumn this is useful. On the flipside anytime the clouds hide the sun this watch is unable to recharge itself.