So on a ride this afternoon my Garmin watch and the Connect app tells me I've done 1489m of total ascent. I know this is wildly over the true figure. It links automatically with Strava which tells me the ascent on the same ride is 516m which feels a lot nearer the truth. I've noticed the watch over reading before, but not by that much! I did wonder if it was set to read altitude in feet, but no it's set to metres.
Is it a case of 'they all do that sir', or is there anything I can do to calibrate it? It's an oldish Vivoactive 3 if that makes a difference.
My Garmin instinct told me I’d climbed 17,900 metres on a 30km ride a couple of weeks back, so it seems they can be a tad wobbly sometimes.
Pretty normal to get discrepancies, even when your Garmin has a barometer.
Same thing happens when I ride with pals and we all record different ascent figures.
Strava explains it here
I had an old vivoactive 3 which did exactly that, I sent it back to Garmin for a replacement in the end
My edge 530 does it if the ride is wet, I think the altimeter gets full of water and totally confused
You can apparently recalibrate your Garmin barometer
The Garmin is using a barometer, Strava just plots the route and calculates altitude by Contour lines, The Barometer will be inaccurate if not calibrated, I have my Fenix 6 set to auto calibrate to GPS at the start of every activity.
Though if you imported the ride to Strava from your Garmin, It should show the Barometer stats unless you select “Adjust Elevation” to override bad Barometer data.
Thanks all, @didn't hurt, going to try that recalibration method cheers 👍
This may help.