Blaze not counting all my steps

[Smackeye]

Anyone else having issues regarding their Blaze not counting/acknowledging all their steps?
I can walk for 2 minutes without my Fitbit registering any steps then suddenly it kicks into life.
I wear it on my non dominant wrist and even tried swinging my arms to create sufficient motion but to no avail.
Compared to a work colleague who has a HR I'm over 2K steps down on him even though we cover the same distance.
I've tried restarting my Blaze but that hasn't cured my steps problem.
Not sure if I need to get it replaced.
Thanks

[FerdinandFitbit]

Hi there @Smackeye. Good to see you in the Community!

Have you tried by any chance to restart it? You can do this by pressing and holding the left and lower right buttons for 10-12 seconds. This will make your Blaze to reboot and after that, you can try it out and see if this makes any difference.

Also, since you say that you're using your tracker on your non dominant hand, make sure that on your tracker settings, you have it set like that as well.

Let me know how it goes!

[Smackeye]

Yes I've tried the restart several times and I have the blaze set on non dominant hand also in my settings.
Not sure what else I can do.
I've just done a short walk of approx. 1500 steps and only picked up 900

[Paints]

I'm also having regular issues since receiving the latest firmware update with my steps not being counted.

I notice it mostly when I've received a reminder to move and so I try to hit the 250 steps but find that the step counter keeps freezing when I'm walking.

[FerdinandFitbit]

Thanks for getting back @Smackeye and  good to see you around @Paints.

At this point, since you've already checked your settings and have already restarted your tracker, I would recommend getting in touch with the Support Team who will be able to take a deeper look and see what could be causing this to get you back on track.

Let me know if you guys need more help!

[Smackeye]

Ok I've emailed the support team so now hoping this issue can be resolved. Just very frustrating when trying to achieve set targets

[Jacmarees]

Hi I've been experiencing this issue since a previous update. I walk long distance and my blaze is only registering about 60% of the distance/steps - a 12km walk will only register 11000 steps and on my phone it is 17000 .21kms only registers about 25000 steps. I turned off the run as an exercise choice when I first set up my tracker and have reselected it from the website and the app since but it doesn't show on my tracker.I wanted to try tracking my walk using the run mode to see if it made any difference. I've tried restarting it and syncing from the website. As said by other users, really frustrating when you're trying to hit your daily goals

[meresydotes]

If you browse through these forums, you'll see lots and lots of threads with people complaining about the same problem. I've got mine solved, but it shouldn't be so much trouble. What I did:

1) Set all the auto workouts to ignore. Back to when fitbit introduced this feature when I had a Charge HR, it was detecting all my workouts, and I guess all my steps, as elliptical and only counting about 2/3 of them. Just removing the auto workouts fixed problems with missing all day steps, but not workout steps. You should definitely manually start whatever workout type you're doing, though, as I believe the HR function checks more often in workout mode.

2) Learned to not swing my arms so much. Yes, really. Back to the Charge HR and continued when I got the Blaze, they both have a really hard time counting steps accurate if you swing your arms a lot, which most people do when fitness walking and running. I started with keeping my Blaze hand on my body and then realized I'd conditioned myself to just not swing my arms so much. You don't want them stationary, just relaxed. When I walk, they hang loosely by my sides. When I run, I just bend my elbows 90 degrees and they move with my shoulders.

I also believe it will be MORE accurate, even with lots of arm swinging, if you tell it that it's on your dominant arm, even if it's not. I don't do that, though.

And we can all keep complaining to fitbit and they may eventually decide to try to fix it!

[Rich_Laue]

@meresydotes this could be because most the 100k of Fitbit blaze buyers per month have found now problems with there tracker. They have not thought about joining the forum to speak highly of their unit. 

Yes I find my Blaze steps off, with several 1000 step tests, it usually reads between 980 and 998.

As for auto workots, they consistently record my 20+ minute brisk walk to collect our ART"s correctly. My arm swings normly.

However a unicycle ride, allways gets recorded as an elliptical, this is actually understandable. 

As for restarting, I haven't had to do this with the latest update. 

I know I should turn off all the unused auto detect events, people report an increase in battery life. 

[meresydotes]

@Rich_Laue I know your Blaze if off by 20 steps a day. Lots of people have larger problems with theirs, where they are off by 30%. I'm sure they would like to have your positive experience, but they are not. And fitbit has shown no interest in fixing the problem.

[Rich_Laue]

I did not say it is off by 20 in a day, but in a 1000 step walk. 

Durring the day when your moves are not predictable, considering that the Blaze is mounted on the arm, there will be plenty of times where the Blaze will either miss steps or count none walking arm movements as steps.. This is simply because the Blaze looks at arm movements and not the movement of the body as the Fitbit One or Zip does. 

Haveing the Fitbit One on one account and the Blaze on a seperate account allows me to be friends. I often see the two units switch possitions on the leaderboard. Most months the total steps recorded by each are within a couple of thousand, ocaisionly within 100.

[spartyski]

I am having the same problem with my blaze not properly counting steps.  It will freeze and I will be walking 200-300 steps before it starts counting 1 step.  It just started happening to me within the past 2 days.  Prior to that it had been pretty darn accurate.  

[meresydotes]

@spartyski If it's new behavior and a restart doesn't fix it, you should probably contact support for a replacement.

[Paints]

@Rich_Laue I really wish I could join you in your positivity but your constant defending of the shortcomings really aren't helpful.

If you would like to swap your perfectly functioning blaze for mine, which keeps stopping counting steps since the last update then I'll happily pay the postage for us to swap!

I'm happy for you to enjoy your blaze but many of us have issues with ours and what we don't need to hear is that yours is working great.

I'm on my second blaze in 6 months because my first one didn't count steps accurately. This one was fine until the last update and now, when I'm trying to hit my 250 step target, after receiving a long awaited reminder to move my blaze just stops counting steps, I'm beginning to think it wants me to fail!

I'm not really.

I can't understand why it makes such a difference if you swing your arms or not, I have a target for 10,000 steps not 10,000 arm swings... Maybe I should start walking on my hands?!

[meresydotes]

@Paints It SHOULDN'T make a difference whether you swing your arms or not. I've just found that it does. I've reported this to fitbit support on these forums and over the phone many many times and they've shown little interest in fixing the problem.

I am pretty sure that the problem started when they introduced the auto-workout feature and that, after that, walking on a treadmill workouts were detected as Elliptical. So maybe it gets confused about what you're doing when your arms move in an exaggerated way? Who knows?

It did get better, though not perfect, when I set Elliptical to ignore, though then it stopped auto-detecting any workouts.

Regardless, I'm hoping if we keep being vocal, fitbit will finally take notice!

[Rich_Laue]

@Paints I'm not defending but stating my experiance. I could see how flailing my arms around as some state they do could give unreliable step count, but I find holding my arm at my side or swinging it counts fine. The arm by the side would count the up/down motion of the body the way the Zip does.

On the blaze the hourly step count stat is suppose to stop counting when it hits 250. The daily step count should continue to count, are you saying your daily steps stop at 250? 

My point in the last post was that having a tracker that looks at arm motions, not legs, may at times miss or give extra steps. I find in the end of the week it is a washout.

Changing the travelers setting to nondominant should increase the steps counted, or please contact.fitbit.com and have them look at the backend of your tracker. 

[Paints]

@FerdinandFitbit I've been tracking my steps today, each time I get a reminder to move, or sometimes before I've been trying to hit 250 steps in the hour.

I tried it in batches of 10 steps and recorded what my blaze counted as you can see in the pic.

It varied from 0 to 10 each time and only counted 10 twice, this was all done in about 10 minutes but has been happening all day.

This really isn't acceptable, I read an article recently where FitBit was prmoting itself not as a tech company, but as a health company. If it can't even get the step count right then how could this ever be relied upon?! Surely it's primary reason for existing is to count steps, all the rest is just fluff.

[Rich_Laue]

@Paints have you tried in batches of 100 or 200? 

[Paints]

So my Blaze is still incapable of counting steps and, following the complete lack of support from fitbit I decided to do another check today.

I've just phoned support to request a full refund. I'm not going to wear a tracker that can't do it's fundamental job any more!

[2brunningfree]

What did Fitbit do for you when you called?