PROBLEM
I got my Charge 5 last fall, and for the first couple months, I tried almost everything to fix the battery drain issue. My battery would be doing fine, and then I'd check again, and for no apparent reason, the battery would have dropped by 50% in less than a day. I tried Fitbit's chat support multiple times, but no one was able to solve this issue.
BUT... in my last chat, the support rep mentioned that my GPS had been on for nearly 8 hours a few days before. They asked if I had been running then, but I hadn't run for several weeks due to an injury. After doing some digging, here's what I've figured out (for at least my situation).
SOLUTION
As long as I do two things, my battery has been fine for the last several weeks.
- Turn off the auto-run-detect feature.
- Whenever I do run, I always reboot my Charge 5 after my run.
REASONING
I think the underlying bug is that when the GPS turns on, it does not always turn off when it's supposed to. That's why I always reboot after a run, to make sure the GPS is off. As for my other issue when I'm not running, I think what's happening is that I'm doing something (like maybe running up the stairs when I'm in a hurry) that triggers the auto-run-detect. That feature is supposed to prompt me to see if I'm running (never actually seen the prompt), but I'm guessing that maybe if I don't respond to the prompt, it's dismissing the prompt - but due to the GPS bug, still leaving GPS on. That would explain the nearly 8 hours of GPS usage when I wasn't even running.
Again, I have no way to confirm this is the actual issue - but for me at least, I have had ZERO sudden battery drains in the last several weeks since making these changes.
