I bought an older (2016) inReach explorer from a member on this site and haven’t had much time to play with it. If I wanted to use the tracking during the day having it ping every 30 min. while out fishing or traveling and turn it off at night after sending a check in message will the battery make a 7 day trip? I will mostly be sending preset messages and maybe a few texts but will keep Bluetooth of when not needed. I guessing around 8 hrs. of use a day. Does it matter if I turn on tracking manually every day or use the -start tracking when unit is turned on- feature? I’m not much of a tech guy so thanks for any help or suggestions!

Moray

I am not sure but I doubt pinging a location every 30 minutes will have enough battery power to run all week. I would bring along a power bank like an Anker PowerCore 20000 to have reserve power to run your Explorer.

Better yet I would bring a lightweight solar charger like a Goal Zero or Suntastics 5 and/or a Power Bank.

I have an Explorer+, which is a different design, but I would expect they're broadly similar in regard to battery draw. A long day of tracking takes 15-20 percent off the charge. If you're only moving part of the day and shut it down when you're not moving you can reduce that to maybe 10-12 percent. Bring a battery along to top it off each night.

I have the same model and used it similarly to what you have described, except we had it track every 4 hours. We still had battery life after 9 days, turning it off as soon as we got to camp (we were backpacking). You probably won't need to have it track in 30 minute increments. We only had ours tracking so that our friends and family could follow us on the internet, it was a 200 mile trip.

I have one from 2016 as well. I used mine on a moose hunt and ran it every day for seven days, with occasional messages to and from my wife at home during that time. I ran it in extended tracking mode and shared that with my wife. There was still enough battery power left at the end of the week that I wasn't too worried about getting an emergency request out. However, I did not use the Bluetooth feature at all and I would advise against that on a long trip. Take a paper map and/or GPS unit to track your own position instead.

Some good info here:

inReach Explorer: Battery Life (Updated)

(Note that Garmin is shutting down that forum from May 10 to May 16.)

gravelroad: "I have one from 2016 as well. I used mine on a moose hunt and ran it every day for seven days, with occasional messages to and from my wife at home during that time. I ran it in extended tracking mode and shared that with my wife. There was still enough battery power left at the end of the week that I wasn't too worried about getting an emergency request out. However, I did not use the Bluetooth feature at all and I would advise against that on a long trip. Take a paper map and/or GPS unit to track your own position instead.


Some good info here:


inReach Explorer: Battery Life (Updated)


(Note that Garmin is shutting down that forum from May 10 to May 16.)"

I was wondering how this feature worked but was having trouble finding info. What was your interval for tracking when you used this feature? I wasn’t planning on using it for navigation but I see that it shuts down message checks. Will unit still receive texts if it is not checking for them? I was only going to use Bluetooth for typing texts and then turning that feature off.

Thank you everyone for the help!

Bringing even a 5000 mAh charging brick isn't overkill because if you run the battery down and then need the unit for an emergency then you might as well not bring it at all (for safety). I've found it to be all to easy to forget to turn it off once in camp and that wears down the battery. Having a brick on hand as a precaution would guarantee getting a message through if needed.
Having one like this would insure that it might get used for something other than canoe trips, and would pay for itself.

We have an Explorer+ and we bring an Anker USB battery so we can recharge the Explorer if we need to. We also have rechargeable headlamps and the battery brick is helpful for being able to recharge those as well. I agree, when you get to camp, it's all to easy to focus on setting camp and to forget to shut down the inReach.

Thanks to all.
I took everyone’s advice and bought a charger. I know for a fact that I will forget to turn off the inReach at least once during the week.