Hello,
Edit: after charging it for over a day just to make sure, it still depletes around 5% every few minutes, so I'm confident it is a battery failure and I used the chat support option to request a replacement as it is still under warranty.
I bought and set-up a Charge 5 in early January this year and suddenly this week it has started rapidly depleting battery. I'll describe some specific incidents below but to briefly explain, I charged it all night, and when I put it on this morning it displayed "100%" charged. I wore it for 10 minutes and checked and it was at 83% charge, and by the end of the hour it had powered off. This has happened multiple times in the past 3-4 days but it is dying faster and faster each time. The mobile sync device I use is a Samsung Galaxy A6 running Android (approx. 5 year old sub-flagship model of Galaxy brand). The only notably issue I have been having prior to this week is that my device has not been syncing automatically, so I have to manually open the Fitbit app and when I do so, it often takes several minutes to sync, but I don't think this is inherently related to my current problem and was tolerable.
I believe the device is still under warranty as it is less than 1 year old and after attempting a few possible fixes posted on this website I believe this is hardware failure.
Fixes I've tried:
- Rebooting the Fitbit using the charging cable button and rebooting my phone.
- Verifying that firmware on Fitbit is up-to-date:
- Fitbit App is up-to-date and when using the Check for Charge 5 Updates option in the App it said it was up-to-date, firmware number started with 57.xxxx which is not what the firmware updates say it should be on this website but I'm assuming I'm reading something wrong, it was updated within the last 2 months
- Turning off any potentially battery draining features and fully charging device for 4+ hours.
- Resyncing the device via bluetooth with my phone.
Any help is appreciated.
Further, more detailed description of issues.
3 days ago after waking up (wore device while sleeping, device had at least 50% battery when going to bed) I checked the time and the device didn't have power, as if the battery had died. I assumed that despite the high battery the day before, maybe I had hit some setting my sleep that caused it to drain the battery (like having it track my heart rate constantly, a feature I've since turned off to make sure this isn't the problem). I got back home later and plugged it in and when it booted on and showed me the charging screen, it reported that it was at 53% charge after only being plugged in for a few minutes. This seemed odd but my only thought was maybe I had some how forced it to turn off somehow or maybe it shut down when I washed my hands or something. Prior to this, the only time I had noticed anything weird battery wise was I had found previously that when charging the device, it would often get to 99% charged and stay there for sometimes another hour before hitting 100% charged.
Since the device was at above 50% charge I put it back on, wore it for the rest of the day, charged it up to 100% before putting it on and going to bed. The following day it functioned properly without issue. Yesterday morning, upon waking up, I checked to make sure it was still working and it showed me the time, so I went to work assuming whatever the problem was got fixed. At work I looked and it was dead again. I assumed something similar to 2 days prior had happened so when I got home, I plugged it in, it booted up and this time reported being at 1% battery (suggesting it had fully died somehow). Unfortunately, I didn't note what the charge was at when I verified it was working that morning, so I'm not sure if it was near dead then. It only recorded 100 steps before dying so it must have died before I even left for work.
After charging it up to around 25% yesterday afternoon, I put it on to see if the battery was holding a charge, and within 5 minutes 25% went to 10% and then within 10 minutes it was unresponsive. I fully charged it to 100% this time (gave it 3 hours to charge) and put it on a few hours before bed, and within an hour it was at under 50% charge. I rebooted it again, verified the firmware as mentioned above, then recharged it before putting it back on and going to sleep. I woke up in the middle of the night around 3 hours later and it was unresponsive again, plugged it in and it said it had 1% battery. From then I proceeded to have the scenario I described near the top of the post this morning.
I apologize for the long post but I thought any information might be useful, please let me know what I should do next or if (and how) I should go about attempting to get an RMA process started.
Max
