Fully charged Charge 6 dies during night?

[uraksha2]

Hey guys! I’ve had my Charge 6 for a month, but twice within one week now, I wake up to it having died at night. First time I had just charged it to 100%. Last night it was at 40% battery. Both times when I woke up it was just dead and all data since the last sync was gone. Is it just broken? Should I try to get it exchanged?

[CrisVillaFitbit]

Hello and welcome to the community, @uraksha2.

Thanks for letting me know about this situation in regards to the battery life of your Charge 6.

My best recommendation for you would be to restart the Charge 6 and check the tips in this article. Let me know how it goes once you've done this, please.

[bobdob]

I've been having this happen about once a week recently as well, after about two months of never having any problems. It seems to happen within the first 24 hours of charging when it happens, and the battery rundown can be enough to completely run out of charge (from 80% or more) within a couple hours, to 40 to 50% loss overnight. (hey why can't I type 40hyphen50 in this forum with a - instead of the word?)

To me it seems much more like a software issue than a hardware one (it's not continuously discharging quickly - most days it loses about 20% which seems what is expected). I've been hoping for a firmware update but there hasn't been one since I got it at the beginning of December. I had been avoiding contacting support (getting this fixed via a firmware update is much preferable to sending it back for a replacement) but I will probably need to do that.

[bobdob]

After posting the above I decided to do a reboot (using the menu on the Fitbit) after charging to see if that gave me any more stability. And it apparently did - I didn't have any issues until 3/18.

I figured I would be due for a charge that evening. At some point that morning I noticed my fitbit was dead. It had last synced around 8am with 21% of battery and I never saw any low battery notification, so it must have gone from 21% to dead quite quickly.

After that point I was monitoring the charge daily and figured I'd try charging soon after it went under 50% to see if that was a useful process. On 3/23 it was at 42% which was completely reasonable. I decided to try to reboot before charging, and was surprised when I put it on the charger that it had dropped to 16%.

So it seems possible that there is a bug related to properly reporting the charge level. It doesn't explain the quick drainage from full or nearly-full but rather the times where it seems prematurely dead with no low battery notification.

Since the last charge I rebooted a few times and the battery level has not dropped like this. I am going to do a daily reset and see if I can see any kind of pattern.

[bobdob]

Update on my situation:

I did the daily reset and for the most part did not have a lot of weird battery drain. I did however have a lockup on average about once a week (or once per charge) so on 4/24 I contacted support by chat, ready to undergo the trouble of a warranty replacement.

Prior to doing any replacement the support person had me do a full "clear user data" on the fitbit (which does wipe out any unsynced data and in my case I had to re-add the fitbit to my account as if it were a replacement - in the end nothing lost) and have not had any kind of trouble since.

So this really strengthens my feeling it is a software issue. I don't recommend anyone doing the above on their own but I do recommend to anyone having frequent black screen lockups to go ahead and contact support, because you might get some help without warranty replacement.

[Fittuned]

I have had the exact same issue with (NEW!) fully charged charge 6 dying overnight, hard to restart, then rapid battery depletion, crashing to 0% before I am able to reboot. This is unacceptable. I have had a charge 3 and 4 and never had this (probable) software issue. I have read extensively on possible “fixes” and I am done spending time trying to get it to work properly. I believe the solution for me is to get a working replacement. Would you please help me with that? Thank you.

[RiekoC]

Hello @Fittuned 

To start the replacement under warranty, contact Fitbit support (<-- click link). Complete the steps until you get to the options for contact. It's probably best to call rather than use the chat feature.

[bobdob]

After I wrote the above I continued to have issues so I continued down the warranty replacement path (it may not be better but it probably won't be worse!).

Support may make you go through some hoops (changing settings etc. to see if that helps) before committing to the RMA but in my case, once I did those things and they didn't help, the rest was painless. The process did take longer than I'd have liked (11 days from initiating the request to receiving the replacement) but they cover return shipping and everything. By the way, someone in this forum said their warranty request was denied due to having bought from Amazon, but it was not an impediment for me at all - maybe they used a 3rd party seller through Amazon?

I've had good luck with chat and can think of no reason why calling would be better (unless you only have a phone and no computer/tablet) but of course it's up to you 🙂