Charge 5 battery draining too fast

[SharleneH]

I have had the new Charge 5 for 2 days. The battery discharges within a day. GPS is off, the phone is not set to always on. In looking over the troubleshooting instructions from Fitbit, it seems that you essentially have to disable all of the features that were selling points of this device in order to get decent battery life. Even my ancient Charge 3 got 6 days on one charge! Has anyone with this battery problem found a solution other than disabling everything?

[Mmtucker]

I fully agree. And the suggestion to turn off spo2 monitoring is so weird. It’s why I upgraded in the first place. I miss the altimeter, but spo2 kept me on Fitbit vs switching to whoop. But battery that lasts less than a day, and needs two+ hrs of charging per day is untenable bc then I’m going to lose sleep or activity data, daily. Previous charge battery got topped off during daily shower, and that never failed, for years. 😒

[chaos_engine]

It’s happening again. As suspected, the reset is merely a temporary solution that ultimately fixes nothing. I’ve even been restarting it proactively to see if I could prevent the battery from randomly draining, but then had it go from 90% at 6:30pm last night to 35% by 11am this morning. 

My settings are the default settings with “calls” turned off. I don’t even believe the settings have anything to do with this. If I had too much set to “on,” then it would consistently drain the battery instead of at random.

Fitbit’s still silent. Imagine that. 

[shimsim]

I am having exactly the same issue, its not just that the battery life is terrible, its the way the battery is draining (or at least the battery % is being reported). For context, everything is default but I have disabled all notifications and manual screen wake. Im not even using it to track any exercise, literally the most basic functions, i.e. heart rate and activity, and purposefully avoiding using anything at least until this issue has been resolved.

So after performing reset and full charge, the first 24 hours the battery hardly drains at all, overnight maybe 2-3% and over the entire day, not more than 10% but on the 2nd day things start to get weird, it will lose 20-30% overnight then by the end of the day its full out of charge, so 50% gone in a day when over the exact same conditions it was not more than 10%.

Out of the past 4 full cycles (reset, charge, battery dead, repeat) 3 of them only got me 48 hours of battery life but one cycle managed to go almost 4 days which is still terrible considering I'm hardly using the device. when it did last 4 days, the battery drain was as expected for the first 3 days, averaging maybe 15% per day, then on the 4th day, rapid drain from ~55% to dead.

Perhaps resting is working for some devices but clearly there is something else going on here, its not about usage or settings (although I'm sure they also impact the battery life) , what I'm seeing is vastly different battery life with exactly the same setting and conditions. How can it drain 3% one night and 30% the next night (and yes my sleep conditions are the same, sleep mode enabled, so no accidental screen wakes)

I work in production, I could not be more sympathetic towards products that have manufacturing issues, making product it hard, really hard but and this is big BUT ..... dont try and sweep this under the carpet or put customers in a holding pattern while you scramble to work out a fix .... its so patronising to go through the same basic 'did you try turning it off and on again' support solutions that are being offered. I don't even understand why this thread is marked as 'answered' when clearly it's not just as simple as going through the power saving tips or performing a reset

Well, sorry to rant, but I had to jump through hoops to even get this charge 5, it's not available where I am stuck at the moment, so now I am faced with the prospect of having a not so heavy paperweight, so disappointed and frustrated 

[Thomasss]

I had this problem. Restarted the device and it now seams fine. Overnight it lost 2% when before restarting it lost 25 - 50%. So recommend to try restarting the device if you have this problem. 

[shimsim]

I probably waffled on too much ..... so to be clear
Reset .... multiple times. full charge ... multiple times. the result is (after a few full cycles covering about 10 days now) first 24 hours ... overnight, 2-3%, full-day, not more than 15%, following 24 hours ... overnight 30%, dead by the end of the day.

Not using anything other than basic functionality (HR and activity), no GPS, no notifications, no screen (manual only). 

A reset might be helping some but this isn't the fix for all customers experiencing this issue.

Last night I decided to do a FULL factory reset, full charge, setup from scratch ..... lets see what happens. so far, overnight plus almost full day, its still showing 97% battery which is great if it continues to lose just a few % a day.

[Charon]

What button are you talking about? I can't seem to find any on the charger. 

[Mopoka]

You can find it at the USB port on the charger. Little black round.

[SunsetRunner]

Hi! Please keep us updated on how the factory reset is working/not working. If it continues to work for you then I will do the same. Thank you!

[Mopoka]

Hi! It works for me! It lasts for 7-8 days without charging. 

[shimsim]

will do, I'm only at the start of day 2 (thats 2 full nights and 1 full day) and still at 91% which is impressive if the battery reporting is accurate and linear but that's part of the issue I've been reporting, its always great for the first few days, then rapidly drops from 50% to dead in less than 1 day ....

well, fingers crossed ..... will post again if anything significant happens 

[BigPhilWalks]

Well done.  Similar experience here.  3 days in now and still at 54% charge left.  I had to do two restarts and leave the watch on charge well beyond showing 100% charge on the screen.  No clever/cute settings, just as it came out of the box.  Starting to feel more confident about the Charge 5 now. 

[MisterB06]

Hi, Same here. Standard settings, battery recommandations applied. So I did hard reset with the USB cable button two times, I uninstalled the SpO2 App and reinstalled it but also what I think made a difference is that I changed the clock face. Then since yesterday the battery seems to be OK

[Nittybit]

My new fitbit I got yesterday didn't even stay charged 24 hours. It was down to 18% in about 20 hrs. And I have nothing on as far as gps or always on. Wonder if I should return it? I have had so many issues with service. This is my second time to try this. I took the first one back and decided to give it another go. 

[Nittybit]

I hope that happens to me. I am charging for the 2cnd time in 20 hours. 

[Nittybit]

The spo2 app is one of the main reasons I picked this model. If I have to disable it it is not worth having.

[Nittybit]

I wondered if they had changed hands. They were so wonderful to work with and this last time it has been horrible. That is a shame. 

[GJT]

To be honest I would return as I did, Fitbit have a problem they obviously don’t have a solution to.  

[GJT]

Owned by Google who will be working on return percentage tolerances. Customer doesnt matter. 

[shimsim]

OK, start of day 3 ( 3 full nights, 2 full days) and I'm on 83%, so far so good .. BUT .... As mentioned before, its really about the last day for me because that's when things seem to fall apart in terms of battery life. So far it's dropping less than 10% a day, but if it suddenly drops 40% on the last day, then its pretty obvious these devices have a battery level reporting issue in addition to the much shorter than advertised battery life. 

@Nittybit you should not need to uninstall spo2, like you said, that is one of the main selling points and reasons to upgrade. I haven't disabled it on mine, nor would I accept having to in order to get the stated battery life. I can't confirm yet if the factory reset works, but some combination of reset + full overnight charge + factory reset might work. It seems to have helped some people

Any idea how we can get the 'answered' status changed, doesn't seem accurate to me

@GJT couldn't agree more, I can't recall the last time I had to spend 2 weeks troubleshooting a consumer device like this. It's beyond a joke, it's not acceptable and it's being handled in such an unprofessional way. Wall of silence from Fitbit, holding pattern customer support responses, i.e. just reset it and hope for the best and no clear solution. The fact that we are all on this community thread and its 14 pages long says it all.

[MisterB06]

Hello friends, 

i had hope by doing things listed in my previous post as the first 20 hours were great. Only lost 18% compared to empty battery before. But this has been short because yesterday night I lost in 3 hours 40% and this morning I have only 7% left. I disabled almost everything. So will contact the support as apparently for majority of charge 5 users it works fine.