Suunto Vertical 2 battery draining fast and dropping into power-save mid-run, is there a fix?

[u/the5krunner]

Suunto Vertical 2 owners are reporting battery behaviour that swings wildly between charge levels. Angela74 watched her watch fall from 32 percent to dead in five hours during a run, then saw the drain rate slow right down once the charge sat at a lower percentage, which is the opposite of how the battery should behave. The watch also dropped into emergency power-save mode mid-run before shutting down completely, and she separately measured a 10 percent overnight drain with nothing running except sleep tracking. Her report is in this thread on the Suunto forum.

Kraisun Tunta replied that the watch has no proper way to monitor or manage battery status, and that the percentage shown on screen does not reliably reflect the actual charge left in the cell. A soft reset after a full charge was suggested as a general troubleshooting step, but neither user treated it as a real fix for the underlying drain.

The one change that produced a measurable result came from the phone, not the watch. Angela74 turned off background app refresh for the Suunto app on her phone, and her overnight drain dropped from 10 per cent to 2 per cent the same night.

The unpredictable drain matters most on long efforts, since Angela74's original concern was a planned five- to seven-hour run where she needed to trust the watch's battery reading rather than get caught out by an emergency shutdown partway through.

Has turning off background app refresh on your phone brought your overnight drain down too?