Charge 5 stopped charging

[JoJo-French]

Hello all. I wanted to give an update on my Charge 5 which recently stopped charging after 1.5 years of service and would show fully charged but removal from charging cable shot it back down to 1% charged and then it would power off. Watch was connected to charger for days. I read all of the forums on this and tried the 3-button click reset multiple times. I was at the point of looking for a used replacement as buying a new one would be silly since it might also do this after a patch or firmware update...

My husband is in IT and thought he might try a few things to see if he could get it to "wake up". He could find no "hacks" outside of the normal 3 button restart. He said that he had an idea to mess with settings from the online login and told me that he changed many random settings within the Device settings on the Fitbit website. He said these changes actually made the device drop connectivity in the account. At this point, the watch was still not working/charging and again, we were looking at a used replacement.

The watch remained on the charger overnight and my husband noticed the next day that it had full charge. He removed from the charger and it held the charge. We re-added the watch to the app on my phone and it synced and is continuing to function at the time of this writing - about two hours later.

We wanted to document this for anyone else who might be having this issue and wants to give it a try since the only other solution that we found did not work. Thanks!

Moderator Edit: Clarified subject

[RiekoC]

Hello @JoJo-French 

Thank you for sharing what your husband did that seems like it got your Charge 5 responding again.

If possible, could you please ask your husband to share the details of what he did, then post it here? That could help a lot of other users who are having similar issues with their Charge 5's.

[Cint]

Thanks for charing, good to have some IT knowledge in the family :-).

This week the charging of my Charge 5 also stopped and actually it went from 19% to 3% as soon as I had connected the cable. Than suddenly it went up again and so as a jo-jo it went on, after 2 hours I had 65% and I didn't dare to connect it again. Meanwhile I had ordered a Charge 6 and when it was delivered I changed my wearable. But as the Charge 6 has the same charging cable I tried this cable on my Charge 5 device and yes it worked well. It looks like my charging cable was the problem the whole time....

[RiekoC]

Hello @Cint 

Thanks for letting us know that your charging issue was apparently related to the charging cable.

[Cint]

After the nice recovery came the disillution, my Charge 5 appeared to be the problem, the battery is dead.

[JoJo-French]

Sorry that I didn't follow up sooner. I listed what he did in the original post. The key was to make device changes in the internet view of the device using a browser. That somehow kicked the device or if the app connectivity. Waited overnight while on charger and then reconnected to app. That's really it, nothing extra, just seemed to work.