Up and Coming

Question

v74: Quest 3 not fully charging

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
February 2, 2025
335 replies
43041 views

My Quest 3 auto-updated to V74 Build 5070966.11190.510 (PTC) on the 31st and it won't charge past 73-74%. At that percentage, the orange charging light starts to flash. This one time I woke up to the quest turned on and in the factory reset menu by itself (the one you get from holding Power + Vol down), with it overheating.

In the settings, there are no updates but whenever I restart or shut down the quest, each time it says wait while the Quest is updating for maybe 2s, which is unusual.

Things I've already tried:

1. Soft/hard reboot.

2. Different cables/chargers.

3. Unpairing and repairing the controllers (as suggested by chat support)

4. Turning off the Quest and then charging it but the same issue persists

#PTC v74 #quest3 #PTC

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M

Maroszek

Participant

Well, I was too quick to cheer. I mean there is a change in how it reports the external battery/main battery charge it seems (while it's off and on the dock). However, the reason I didn't see the weird "charging" status while powered on and the Elite Strap plugged in last night--was that I had run the external battery down to 0 while playing DCS. I thought about after I had posted and dropped off for the night and checked, sure enough this morning while on and if the Elite Strap had any charge it will show "charging" the main Quest 3 battery (which is wrong).

This goes back to what MugenSukuyomi is seeing with the USB-C charging. Meaning, if I unplug the Battery from the USB-C on the Q3, put it on the dock, the Q3 itself will charge pretty normally. If I plug in the dock AND have the elite strap plugged into the Q3 USB-C port, it slows things down to a crawl and will even slowly drain the main Q3 battery. Interestingly enough before I did the power on/off tango I could leave the headset+battery on the dock and eventually they would balance out to 75% on the headset and various degrees of discharge on the external battery.

SO! BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front) for this, the o'l power toggle did help the headset report a bit more correctly, but it's still not interacting with USB-C devices (battery or charging cable) like it should.

They need to update the firmware again, I think I'll try the PTC to see what that does when they roll another one out.

Best wishes for you all and again thank you for collaborating and testing the various configurations on this!

ConvexRook

Participant

there's a new version PTC V76 and charging issue still there

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TexanSin83

Participant

I got the update today and the charging issue still remains on mine as well.

D

DiegoDelanoche

Participant

Since v74, my Q3 only loads up to 76% and it drains the battery. After 20 Minutes, the energy is gone. It looks like, that v74 is mess. Please fix it asap, because it isnt fun anymore.

thank you...

D

DarkVcious

Participant

Have done a bit of investigating of my own.

Sideloaded an app that allowed me to access the stock android settings menu to be able to have more info on battery usage (no clue why Meta won't allow you to do that out of the box while they haven't ported everything to their own settings, but eh).

First thing, another app I had sideloaded was draining battery at an incredibly fast rate, I limited it so that it couldn't run in background (again, stock android feature that we somehow don't have access to), that immediately fixed my battery draining way too fast.

Other thing I noticed, the "elite strap with battery pack" seems to be extremely unreliable. Sometimes everything works well, it charges fast and outputs enough power to keep the headset battery charging while in use. Sometimes it randomly outputs less power, sometimes it just doesn't charge fast enough.

Whenever it is fully charged, and untethered, it seems to work okay, but as soon as I try to keep it tethered (main reason why I bought this strap, cable dangling in my back sounded way better than dangling from the side of my head), all bets are off on what it will decide to do.

Even yesterday, I had the external battery plugged in at both ends, headset went down to 7% while the external battery was at 90%.

As soon as I plugged the headset directly, battery graph shot up to "fully charged in 2 hours".

I ordered a third party strap to see if it has the same issues. It sure is nice to have the external battery levels reported inside of the headset, but if it means the thing will act dumb and not charge, I'd rather not have it.

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TomCgcmfc

Honored Contributor

DarkVcious My +1yo Q3 Elite battery strap continues to work/charge perfectly with my Q3 and non-beta v74. I don't need to sideload a bunch of questionable 3rd party apps to tell me this. When I go to the quick menu top left battery info and hover over it I can see that the Elite strap battery is always discharging first, and the headset battery only starts discharging once the strap battery goes below ~5-10%. Putting then on the stock charger and they both charge up fine.

I'm not sure why you are seeing all this but it could be due to some of your 3rd party sideloaded apps. I don't use any of these btw. Maybe try getting rid of these and see if this helps. Cheers.

i9 13900K water cooled, RTX4090, Z790 MB w/wifi6e, 64Gb 6400 ram, 2x2TB SSD, 1000W PSU, Win 11, QPro, Q3, w/Link and Air Link, Vive Pro1 with 2x2.0 base stations, Etsy lens mod and Index Controllers

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DarkVcious

Participant

Everything is sandboxed in android, no matter how much crap you install that runs in the background, the only thing it can do is drain the battery faster, not mess with core services like managing charging (and then the solution is simple, just don't allow those apps to run in the background and you're good).

I am currently trying to do a full charge cycle of both the external and the internal battery to see if things go back to normal, as it was working as intended for me for a while even on v74 and I would really like to go back to treating the strap and the headset as one device and not worry about it.

If it doesn't, I will try to monitor power draws/outputs of the headset/strap but I'm not there yet.

I'm really happy that your quest is running fine, but for my usecase, I do need to sideload some apps, and I do need the headset to be able to stay on and active for long periods of time. (I am trying to use it for work, and my work days are longer than 2/3 hours.)

I do agree that if you don't need any sideloaded apps, then don't sideload crap as it will make the battery drain quicker.

The issue here is clearly something strange happening with either the headset "deciding" it is "charged enough" and not pulling enough energy, or the external battery not working as intended for some reason. Just trying to find out what's happening 😉

I also don't own the charging station, and have to go through usb c cables and chargers, so that's not an option for me (not to mention the battery life even with the external battery is not enough for my use case)

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DarkVcious

Participant

"Go to settings" on sidequest is the only one I found that doesn't redirect to the headset settings menu and correctly brings up the android settings.

Probably a good idea to not mess around too much in there, but I found the battery menu to be very useful in there.

D

DarkVcious

Participant

I've done some observing of how many watts everything is pulling, looks like Meta did something to prolong the lifespan of the batteries (which is a good thing) but probably were too aggressive.

The headset (and external battery) seems to be pulling less and less power the fuller they are. (Good thing as it puts less stress on the battery).

Only issue is that at 74%, if the headset is in use, it seems to be using more power than it requests, so the battery starts discharging again, and in some cases, it doesn't ask for more power until it dies.

When not in use, it seems to be pulling between 0.5 and 5W whenever it reaches around that 75% mark.

So if your use is light, and you are just putting it in charge and forgetting about it after each 1/2hr session, everything should be fine.

I managed to get it past 75% while "soft off" by unplugging and plugging back in the charge cable (forcing it to charge at 20W for a few seconds at a time) and now it's at 79%, on, and neither charging nor discharging (it's pulling about 10/12W).

When turning it off, now that it's past the 75% mark, it appears to be pulling 11 to 16W and charging kind of fast as a result, but as soon as I turn it back on, it drops back down to 11/12W which seems to be just enough to keep the headset running. It also seems to be charging properly if just put in sleep mode (it shoots up to 16/18W and the battery charges again).

As for the external battery, right now it's at about 84% and no matter what I do it won't pull more than 1/2W. Good news is when I plug it into the headset it seems to be pulling its 1/2W to charge + whatever the headset is asking for.

So basically, seems like they implemented some improvements for the battery lifespan, but they were not explicit about it, don't let you configure it (most devices will have an explicit menu to limit charge to X% when plugged into the wall) and there seem to be a few bugs that make the headset not "ask for full power again" when the battery goes down for some reason.

I'll try charging everything fully and see how things go.

EDIT : I have now managed to charge the headset to 100% (it fell down to less than 5W for the last few % like what it did when approaching 75%).

The external battery would not charge past 87% unless it was plugged into the headset (which is a bit wierd, but whatever).

Now both are at 100%, I'm using the headset plugged to the wall, and it's pulling less than 3W so I doubt it will stay that way for long.

We'll see what happens I guess.

EDIT2 : Yup, it is not pulling more than 5W either through the external battery, or directly from the wall and is steadily discharging. I'm guessing it will stop discharging around 80% from what I'm seeing (the power it's pulling is steadily increasing as the battery depletes).

Not sure what is happening, but it is very strange. I would expect it to always pull whatever power it needs to run + whatever is needed to charge the battery, and once full work "off the wall" instead of off the battery.

If this is the behaviour of all headsets, then currently it cannot charge fully while running, and will discharge to 75/80% even plugged to the wall (even lower if it doesn't start pulling more power soon).

stereoman

Up and Coming

Somehow I doubt an improvement to battery management would include a pulsing or flashing left lense after the headset reaches 74% charge, add to that there are some who claim they are not having these issues with thier headsets at all and are charging to 100%, so from that we could probably surmise that this is unlikely to be an improvement to the battery and more likely a bug with the V74 update that is effecting certain headsets and needs addressing asap.

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DarkVcious

Participant

I guess it's more about how you use the headset.

I never actually leave it charging when I leave it, and when I use it it's for long periods of time.

I'm guessing people that don't see the issue just leave the headset charging when not using it, and never use it for more than 1 or 2 hours so never notice the issue since it seems to mostly charge properly when left in sleep mode/turned off.

Never said it wasn't a bug, or that it wasn't incredibly annoying. Clearly the headset is not pulling as much power as it should to run itself without discharging the battery since the update.

F

Freds690069

Up and Coming

Same here.

was charging to 100%, green light.

got v74. Orange light and never goes above 72%. Started happening within two hours of installing the update.

stereoman

Up and Coming

You literally said and I quote "seems like they implemented some improvements for the battery lifespan", this does not seem like an improvement to me, more like a bug but there's no point in arguing we both agree that this is a bug and is very annoying and we're all trying to figure out what's going on and trying to solve the issue

but Meta needs to address this as it's reflecting really poorly on them and just shows a complete disregard for thier customer base that we are still dealing with this issue when a simple rollback to V72 would solve the problem for now and give them time to investigate the issue further with V74, instead of leaving us thier loyal customers waiting for a possible fix.

It's no way to treat valuable customers and it's honestly got me looking at the new valve headset as I can't beleive the customer service here.

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DarkVcious

Participant

Yeah, same here.

The low price, amazing screen and "standalone"-ness of the headset is what brought me back to Meta, but a problem like that that could have been caught in 5 minutes of QA/QC is making me regret my decision a bit ...

If even I with limited knowledge and tooling can figure out in less than an hour that the power management is broken, what are they doing ?

(Left the headset plugged in overnight btw, can confirm that if left alone long enough, it will charge to 100%, but as soon as it is in use, it will go down to 70-80% battery since it's only pulling power proportional to how much "juice" is in the battery and it will only stop draining whenever what it pulls reaches what it's consuming to run whatever you are doing).

mugensukuyomiAuthor

Up and Coming

I'm not in the states so when the Q3 came out the 128gig was going for ~750USD here but I managed to get it for $620. I'm so glad I rarely use it and it's mostly for tinkering but people who rely on it for work are rekt 💀

It's preposterous that they don't acknowledge this issue. I'd have expected a dedicated message on the device with a resolution timeframe. They're doing all this at the consumer's expense with no acknowledgement or compensation. Crazy honestly

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Hirothefox

Up and Coming

https://communityforums.atmeta.com/t5/Get-Help/PTC-v76-Quest-3-still-not-fully-charging-continued-from-v74/m-p/1306689#M361115

Also not resolved in PTC v76

R

RealAct

Up and Coming

It's funny. I just received a private message from Meta asking me if I still need help with my issue so they can help me resolve it. Are they being serious about this whole situation?

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