Your watch has a solar panel. Garmin's answer to that is a tiny sun icon. Solar Harvest actually measures what that panel is doing for you: real battery gain and drain pulled from your own watch (not a marketing number), a live compass tracking exactly where the sun is and where it's headed before sunset, and a "catching" score that calls out shade and canopy instead of blaming your sensor. Seven pages of real astronomy, computed on your device (sunrise, sunset, elevation, bearing, no stale weather cache needed), a sun-bonus estimate that learns from your own rides/outdoor activities and remembers it next time out, and four alerts tuned to only interrupt you when it's actually worth knowing. Fourteen developer fields turn all of it into real charts on Garmin Connect after your activity too, not just numbers nobody can read. WHEN NUMBERS APPEAR Your watch reports its battery in whole percent steps, and Solar Harvest only quotes what those steps prove. At a typical GPS drain of about 2% an hour: • Solar intensity and full sun time: right away. Catching, sun window and compass: once GPS locks • Battery drain: an upper bound after 5 minutes, an early "~" read within about 30 minutes, and a confirmed rate with runtime left within about an hour • Sun Bonus: about 2.5 to 3 hours in one activity when the drain follows the light plainly through real sun and shade, about 6 to 6.5 hours with subtler contrast, or pooled across activities with a mix of sun and shade, roughly six 2-hour activities or three 3-hour ones. A day of even light teaches it nothing, however long. Until then it reads MEASURING with how far the evidence is, in percent. A bonus resting on earlier activities is marked "~" HOW TO ADD SOLAR HARVEST TO AN ACTIVITY Some newer watches offer to add Solar Harvest to an activity as soon as it installs. If yours did not ask, or you have an older watch such as the fēnix 6 series, add it yourself: 1. On the watch, press START and choose the activity you want to use it with, such as Run or Hike. 2. Hold MENU (the UP button) and open that activity's settings. 3. Select Data Screens, then choose a screen to edit, or add a new custom data screen. 4. Change the layout to a single field for the full Solar Harvest display. 5. Select the field, scroll to the Connect IQ category near the end of the list, and choose Solar Harvest. 6. Press BACK to save. Solar Harvest now appears whenever you start that activity. On many newer watches you can also do this from the Garmin Connect app: open your device, go to Activities & Apps, choose the activity, and edit its Data Screens. IF SOLAR HARVEST IS NOT IN THE CONNECT IQ LIST - Sync your watch with Garmin Connect so the download can finish, then restart the watch. - Update your watch software. - Watches limit how many Connect IQ data fields one activity can use, often to two. Remove one to make room. - Data fields appear only inside activities, not on the watch face or in glances. Free, and always will be. If it makes your rides and or activities a little brighter (pun intended) and you'd like to say thanks, tips are never expected but always appreciated: https://ko-fi.com/texasbe2trill/tip Can't tip? Leave a star on the project's source code ;) https://github.com/texasbe2trill/SolarHarvest WANT IT ON THE DIAL ALL DAY? SolarDay, from the same developer, is a watch face that puts the sun on a 24-hour ring around your dial, leaves a trail wherever your watch was charging, keeps your last seven days of sun, and shows the sun bonus measured on your own watch. It is on the store here: https://apps.garmin.com/en-US/apps/4dfc07bf-4ade-4ea8-8830-4e53c23c1919

v1.7.0 Sun Bonus says how far along it is. While it measures, the page reads MEASURING with a percentage: how far the evidence is toward the first figure, counting the battery steps pooled across your activities and how much the light varied within them, whichever is further behind. A walk in even light stays at zero, because even light teaches nothing about what the sun is worth; a walk through sun and shade moves it. Once there is a figure, the chip beside it is UNLIT: what the hour would have cost with no light on the panel. Five more numbers in Garmin Connect. Every activity now records the watch's own battery days reading, unrounded, as a chart; the battery life spent on the activity and on each lap, in minutes; full sun so far as a rising curve; and Sun Saving in minutes of battery life per hour of full sun, measured from the days reading, which moves about thirty times finer than the percent. These are the readings behind a finer Sun Bonus that a single walk can measure, and the field starts quoting it only once your own activities have proved it. Times you can read at a glance. The Sun Window page is titled TO SUNSET and its big number is the daylight left, 5h41; the clock time of sunset, 7:41, now stands at the foot of the daylight arc where the day ends. Before, the title was the sunset time and the daylight left sat under it like a second clock. Across the field, a colon is always a clock time and hours and minutes are always a duration, so 23m of full sun no longer reads as 23:46, a quarter to midnight. Labels that say what the number is. Sun Window: SUN LEFT is the full sun still to come before sunset at the rate the panel is catching it now. Full Sun Time shows IN SUN, the share of the activity spent in sun, instead of repeating its own headline in minutes. Sun Bonus: SUN is the full-sun time the bonus is scaled by. And where a screen is too narrow for two labelled numbers, the row keeps both when the second carries its own unit (4.6h, 93%) and drops its label, instead of dropping the number. v1.5.2 Sun Bonus arrives sooner. The bonus is measured, not assumed: the field fits how fast your battery drains against how much light the panel is getting, interval by interval, and quotes the runtime the sun bought only once that fit has earned it. Until now it waited for twelve battery steps across a wide range of light, which on a large solar battery could take several activities. It now also accepts fewer intervals, five or more, whenever the fit is sure of itself: the drain has to follow the light clearly, judged against the scatter of the measurements, so a walk with an hour or two of real shade and sun can show a bonus the same day. A day of even light, or a drain that wandered on its own, still shows nothing, because nothing was learned. Evidence keeps pooling across activities, and whatever your watch had already learned carries forward. Changing pages. Auto cycle is the default and turns the pages on its own, every 8 seconds unless you change it; or pin the one page you want. "Lap button also changes page" is off by default and now says so in its own words: the watch records a lap whenever the lap button is pressed, with or without this field, and no data field can prevent that. If you had it on and did not want the laps, leave it off and let the pages cycle. Also in this version - The auto cycle setting sits with the Page setting, and shows its range (3 to 60 seconds). - Learned calibration saved by earlier versions is read as before; nothing needs to be re-learned after updating. v1.4.0 • Now supports the fēnix 6 Pro Solar, 6S Pro Solar and 6X Pro Solar, including tactix Delta Solar and quatix 6X Solar. • The fēnix 6 builds are new: if you use one, feedback is very welcome.