Charge 6 - Battery draining fast

[Shelly.Nix]

I charged my watch on 3 days ago and this morning it is back to 15% so needs charging again. What could be causing this?

Moderator Edit: Clarified subject

[N8teGee]

Hi @Shelly.Nix

If you haven't already done so I would recommend restarting your Charge 6 to see if that fixes the excessive battery drain.

Also do you have the always on display (AOD) active? As that will eat into battery life significantly. 

[Hockeyplayer]

Mine lasts 6 days ish but if it runs out of battery it then won’t show any of my data. 

[Keebi]

Mine did when I first got it but I need to figure out which settings to disconnect for longer life.

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Shelly.Nix, I’m having the same challenge, I think it’s the apps that are activated on the watch wish there was a cheat sheet.

[N8teGee]

The sp02 app will be quite a battery drain. So if you are looking to save battery and you don't care about spO2 measurements, it's worth uninstalling this. Also as I mentioned above always on display is a huge drain, so disable that and use the raise to wake gesture instead. 

[gundagai]

GPS uses a lot of battery and the thing that uses GPS is the Auto Recognized Exercises.

Go to Settings -> Peferences -> Exercise -> Auto Recognized Exercises

If you don't care about having your Charge 6 figure out which exercise you are doing then set each of the 7 exercises to Ignored.  Making this change more than doubled my battery life.

The way I look at it is if I'm walking, I already know I'm walking and having the Charge 6 tell me I'm walking... well, duh.

[DavidFitbit]

Hi everybody, thank you for the contribution to the community!

You can find additional tips on how to improve battery life in our help article Can I extend my Fitbit device's battery life? below the section "What are tips to extend my Fitbit device's battery life?"

In effect this one talks about features such as SpO2, GPS and always-on display.

[niki71uk]

You are lucky then mine doesn't even last 1 day never mind 2

[Ashly344]

That’s what mine is doing currently. I have to charge it every other day it seems - if not sooner. And I have my screen display off. Notifications off. Apps off. I’m just using it for step count and sleep at this point and even then it’s failing me because it keeps dying. It’s fully updated. I don’t understand wtf is going on

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I charged it for the past few hours, just unplugged it no more than 20min ago and it’s at 61% even though it was fully charged when I unplugged it .. again .. no more than 20min ago. 

[RiekoC]

Hello @Ashly344 

When my Charge 5 started having rapid battery loss, I restarted and recharged my device multiple times over several days. As soon as I saw a rapid drop in battery, I restarted my Charge 5 and put it on the charger until it was back to 100%, often doing this multiple times in a day. Eventually, this process got my device "unstuck" and the battery went back to lasting 6-7 days. Although there's no guarantee that this will work for your Charge 6, it might be worth a try.

[BrianDraws]

I've been having the same problem with my Charge 6 (activated on Nov 18 in 2023) since the last update. I've uninstalled all the apps, had manual mode on the display, uninstalled the Fitbit app off my phone, restarted my Charge 6, and even removed it from the app and tried adding it again. Done pretty much everything I've seen on here to try and fix it. I thought I had fixed it one time, since the battery life wasn't being sucked away, but that lasted a whole day before going back to the battery dying within 1.5 days. 

So the other day I found out that for some reason, the app wasn't connecting to my Charge 6 thru Bluetooth. Which it should have been the whole time, since It's how the device should connect. Even though my phone (S20 Ultra 5G) was still getting heartbeat data from it. So the app asked to pair with it and was at 75% battery life on Thursday after I had just pulled it off the charger and as of today, Sunday, it's at 31%. Which is about the 12 to 15% drain that is normal for it. I'm hoping this isn't just another one-time fluke and it keeps the battery life it should.

Though the Fitbit app is still having an issue where it gets about 90% thru the sync process and just sits there. Closing the app and opening it again is the same issue. Restarting my phone did fix it. I have a feeling the app is having a coding issue since it would just get stuck in Sync, even if my phone hasn't been restarted for a week. This is only a new issue since the last firmware update. One anomaly did pop up when trying to remove my Charge 6 before I did remove the app from my phone. Got an error message saying it couldn't complete the process (or something to that effect). Which is also something that shouldn't be popping up at all if the app was working as intended. I haven't checked if this is still a problem yet, since I've been keeping up the updates for the Fitbit app whenever Google Play has one available.

[SherieB]

I'll try this (have the same phone). Battery was 86% this morning, got a warning that it's 20% at 5 pm and a minute later is dropped to 7%. 

I have charge 6 since 2023 and never had this issue before. I didn't change any settings, so I suspect this is a problem on their software end. 

Well, this is my last Fitbit ever for sure!