Charge 5 won't hold a charge

[Howzat69]

My Fitbit Charge 5 used to hold a charge for 7 days, now I'm lucky if it makes it for 3 days. Now, as soon as I connect it to the charger, I get the Fitbit logo and then it briefly shows me the % charged. The weird thing is that it says it's at 56% - every time. If it really is at 56% charged, then why has the device stopped working? It's got me stumped and it's becoming a pain in the a##!


Moderator Edit: Clarified subject

[Julia_G]

Hi, @Howzat69 all rechargeable batteries will deteriorate with age, so after a year or more of use a reduction from 7 days to 3 days would not be unusual.  It sounds like the battery is no longer accurately calibrated.  If your Fitbit is not working I would ignore the 56% information and simply continuing to charge it as normal.  From fully discharged I would recommend giving it at least 1-2 hours for full charge.  If after that you get 3 days that is not too bad for a well used Fitbit.

Moving forward I would recommend charging little and often - maybe for 15 minutes or so each day while you are showering etc in the morning (that will also give your wrist a rest) or relaxing with a book or television in the evening.  Charging that way is likely to prolong the overall life of your battery.

You may also want to give your Charge 5 a restart as that will shut down any background activities that could be causing unusual battery drain.

You may also find this help article useful.  It gives tips for extending the battery life of your Fitbit, including shortening screen time out, avoiding animated clock faces, limiting notifications to essentials, etc.

I hope this helps.  Welcome to the Community Forums!

[Jfeen82]

Wow so all these Charge 5 batteries are deteriorating at the same time, conveniently. 
@Julia_G 

[Julia_G]

---

@Jfeen82 wrote:

Wow so all these Charge 5 batteries are deteriorating at the same time, conveniently. 
@Julia_G 

---

Hi, @Jfeen82 , all rechargeable batteries deteriorate over time.  And all rechargeable batteries have a finite number of charge/discharge cycles. How quickly they deteriorate depends to a large extent how they are treated.  Repeatedly allowing your battery (on any device, not just Fitbits!) will result in faster deterioration than if you keep your batteries above 20% as much as possible.  Unfortunately that is just a fact of physics…. But you can put off the deterioration as long as possible by charging little and often as recommended above, avoiding deep discharges as much as possible.

[SunsetRunner]

My Fb has lost all ability to hold a charge ! This happened suddenly yesterday. Prior to that it would go for weeks. What can I do to resolve ?

[Jfeen82]

Nothing. Fitbit solution of restarting doesn’t work and they refuse to take responsibility for releasing a faulty firmware version that killed the batteries. As you can read from all the comments, many people are having the same problem.

[Jfeen82]

@Julia_G believe what you want. All these people on this forum didn’t just have their batteries go bad at roughly the same time. This is due to the firmware update 194.91. There are just too many people having the same problem. 

[Hotwire69]

that's doing the same on mine too, screen goes blank like its needing charged, but when I put it on charge, it says it got a good charge on it..... actually annoying and end up not wearing it 

[Rpkwiat]

Same thing happening for me.   All of a sudden it went from 99% charge to 1% and it won’t stay on long enough to reset.  Fitbit needs to take responsibility, it’s no coincidence that a lot of customers are having the same issue 

[LisaSHobbs]

I just started to get the same thing. About 2 days ago, it went dead. So I connected it to the charger. Looked at it the next morning, and it was still dead … and now very hot. So I disconnected it and let it rest to cool down for several hours. I got it to turn on and it said it had 1% power, and then died. So I charged it again but this time only for a few hours. And it’s still dead. So I’m thinking that something is up. I guess it’s their way of pushing the 6 on us so we can “upgrade”. I’m thinking no. 

[9v9z9f]

I think my charge 5 is getting old because I had it since February 2022, so it is two years old. So I'm thinking about getting charge 6 or a sense 2 or whatever it's called. But not sure if it's worth it yet. Can anyone tell me?

[SunsetRunner]

I decided that FitBit was not a good product anymore and cancelled my
subscription and threw the Fitbit away ‘

[AjMack210]

Oh no! Mine started that a couple days ago … I tried the pressing the button 3 times on the flat end as recommended- that seemed ro help it run a couple hrs… but its not useful now 😞  Its not very old to suddenly not hold the charge… 

[RiekoC]

Hello @AjMack210 

When my Charge 5 started having rapid battery drain, I restarted and recharged my device multiple times over several days. As soon as I noticed the battery% had a big drop, I restarted my device then put it on the charger, often doing this multiple times in a day. This process eventually got my Charge 5 "unstuck" and the battery life went back to lasting 6-7 days. Although there's no guarantee that this will work, it might be worth a try.

[AjMack210]

Thanks ! I will give it a try ! I have had no luck getting through to 💬 or talk to tech support 🥹
Sent from my iPhone