Inaccurate battery percentage/fast battery drain?

[mlindgren]

I've generally been very happy with my Ionic's battery life, but twice now I've run into an issue where the reported battery life seems to be inaccurate. In both cases, during the fourth day since my last charge, the Ionic starts the day showing 40% battery left, but then rapidly drops to zero over the course of a few hours. I think I'm still getting more or less the expected amount of battery life, but this issue is still pretty annoying because it makes it difficult to tell when I actually need to charge the device. I don't remember this being an issue when I first got the Ionic... it's only happened the last couple times I've had to charge it.

As of right now, I'm sitting at 87% battery remaining after charging my Ionic yesterday and working out for about an hour. With 4 days of expected battery life, I think it should be closer to 75%. So it looks to me like the remaining battery percentage is overestimated until the fourth day, and then it rapidly drops.

Has anyone else experienced this issue? Is there a way to re-calibrate the battery percentage display?

[WavyDavey]

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@mlindgren wrote:

I've generally been very happy with my Ionic's battery life, but twice now I've run into an issue where the reported battery life seems to be inaccurate. In both cases, during the fourth day since my last charge, the Ionic starts the day showing 40% battery left, but then rapidly drops to zero over the course of a few hours. I think I'm still getting more or less the expected amount of battery life, but this issue is still pretty annoying because it makes it difficult to tell when I actually need to charge the device. I don't remember this being an issue when I first got the Ionic... it's only happened the last couple times I've had to charge it.

As of right now, I'm sitting at 87% battery remaining after charging my Ionic yesterday and working out for about an hour. With 4 days of expected battery life, I think it should be closer to 75%. So it looks to me like the remaining battery percentage is overestimated until the fourth day, and then it rapidly drops.

Has anyone else experienced this issue? Is there a way to re-calibrate the battery percentage display?

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Hi @mlindgren,

I would perform a restart on the tracker to see if that clears it up. Other than that, I don't know of any battery calibration.

From your post, I would suggest the 40% battery level reading on day 4 sounds too high, unless you've disabled GPS on all the tracked exercises (or aren't logging exercises). You can also check if your fitbit app is set to "always connected" for the Ionic. That is known to increase battery drain.

[shipo]

@mlindgren, as a point of reference, I charged early yesterday evening; here are the stats:

• 21.5  hours since taking it off the charging cable
• 93 minute GPS tracked run
• 76% battery life remaining

[mlindgren]

@WaveyDavey, thanks for the suggestion, but I have restarted the tracker multiple times (due to unrelated issues) and it hasn't helped.

@shipo, your numbers are more in line with what I'd expect. I'm now roughly 48 hours since my last charge, including about 3 hours of exercise (without GPS, mind you), and my Ionic still shows 71%. I am sure that is not accurate.

[shipo]

@mlindgren, hmmm, 48 hours since last charge, no GPS usage, and showing 71%; sounds fairly reasonable to me.  I am roughly 45 hours since my last charge and have run in GPS mode for 160 minutes and I'm showing 50% charge remaining.  I can easily see my two hours and forty minutes in GPS mode as being the difference in what we have remaining of our battery life.

[mlindgren]

I guess I'll find out in two days whether or not the displayed battery percentage will rapidly drop from ~40% to 0% again. 🙂

[WavyDavey]

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@shipo wrote:

@mlindgren, hmmm, 48 hours since last charge, no GPS usage, and showing 71%; sounds fairly reasonable to me.  I am roughly 45 hours since my last charge and have run in GPS mode for 160 minutes and I'm showing 50% charge remaining.  I can easily see my two hours and forty minutes in GPS mode as being the difference in what we have remaining of our battery life.

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But how about "during the fourth day since my last charge, the Ionic starts the day showing 40% battery left". By the fourth day for me, assuming some GPS-tracked activities and a bunch of syncs, I'm a lot closer to 0% than 40%. The Charge 2's used to have a bug where they would get stuck on a certain battery percentage, regardless of the actual battery level. It made me wonder if something similar could be going on here.

@shipo, do you actually have 40% battery life left after tracking activities and 4 days of no charging? If so, maybe my Ionic has an issue? Or maybe my drain is from using its music features?  It's difficult to say, because there are many features on the Ionic that could cause battery drain, besides normal GPS-enabled tracking. Some of it depends on which of those features are enabled.

[shipo]

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@WavyDavey wrote:

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@shipo wrote:

@mlindgren, hmmm, 48 hours since last charge, no GPS usage, and showing 71%; sounds fairly reasonable to me.  I am roughly 45 hours since my last charge and have run in GPS mode for 160 minutes and I'm showing 50% charge remaining.  I can easily see my two hours and forty minutes in GPS mode as being the difference in what we have remaining of our battery life.

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But how about "during the fourth day since my last charge, the Ionic starts the day showing 40% battery left". By the fourth day for me, assuming some GPS-tracked activities and a bunch of syncs, I'm a lot closer to 0% than 40%. The Charge 2's used to have a bug where they would get stuck on a certain battery percentage, regardless of the actual battery level. It made me wonder if something similar could be going on here.

@shipo, do you actually have 40% battery life left after tracking activities and 4 days of no charging? If so, maybe my Ionic has an issue? Or maybe my drain is from using its music features?  It's difficult to say, because there are many features on the Ionic that could cause battery drain, besides normal GPS-enabled tracking. Some of it depends on which of those features are enabled.

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No, I don't usually make it through the 4th day (assuming I've run all four days).  What is much more normal for me is to charge the tracker say on the evening of day 0, run days 1, 2, and 3 (my average run is probably about 80 minutes long), and by the end of day 3 I typically have less than 20% charge showing, and that's when I hook it up again to the charger.  That said, I did manage to get it down to 5% this last Sunday after forgetting to charge it and then going out on a three hour hike.  🙂

[mlindgren]

Alright, now I don't know what to make of this. I thought the issue had stopped last week I had great battery life and the battery meter was accurate throughout, and went down at a consistent rate. But then yesterday the battery suddenly got low only two days after I last charged it, so I charged it again last night. This morning, the battery appeared to be draining at a normal rate, but I just checked again and now I'm down to 54%, less than 24 hours after my last charge.

I'm on the latest developer firmware (27.30.5.8), so maybe there's a bug... whatever the case, this is getting seriously annoying.

[SunsetRunner]

Hi there. I've had my Ionic since mid-October and the battery has lasted 4-7 days, no problem... until this last week. I've suddenly had to charge it every or every other day because it's draining so fast, particularly overnight. I've changed all settings to conserve the battery life but nothing appears to have helped. It was fully charged yesterday at noon, down to about 75% by the time I went to bed and it's 56% this morning. This is definitely not typical. I haven't changed my usage of the watch, other than to alter the settings to help to no avail. Is this a known issue? I was wondering if it was connected to a software update or something?

[shipo]

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@SunsetRunner wrote:

Hi there. I've had my Ionic since mid-October and the battery has lasted 4-7 days, no problem... until this last week. I've suddenly had to charge it every or every other day because it's draining so fast, particularly overnight. I've changed all settings to conserve the battery life but nothing appears to have helped. It was fully charged yesterday at noon, down to about 75% by the time I went to bed and it's 56% this morning. This is definitely not typical. I haven't changed my usage of the watch, other than to alter the settings to help to no avail. Is this a known issue? I was wondering if it was connected to a software update or something?

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There has been no update to the Ionic firmware, so that isn't the issue.  I had a Surge for a couple of years before I got my Ionic, and in that time twice it got into a mode where it would burn the battery down in about 24 hours; in both cases I restarted the device and the battery usage went back to normal.  Give it a try and let us know.

[SunsetRunner]

Hey @shipo, thanks for responding. I've now reset it three times. The third time was yesterday evening. I charged it and shut it down overnight. I had a lot of trouble getting it to wake up this morning. I was under the impression that pressing any button should turn it on but I had to press and hold down all three for over 30 seconds before it finally worked.

Since Monday*, it's been dropping at a 2%/hour rate, losing 20%+ overnight. This isn't terrible or anything, it's just about half the battery life I was getting previously. And I used to have all the bells and whistles activated, whereas I've now arranged all the settings to prolong battery life as long as possible.

Do you have any other suggestions to troubleshoot this issue? I found Fitbit's return/warranty policy (https://www.fitbit.com/legal/returns-and-warranty) and I'd consider that but it's been 52 days since I purchased mine. I'm not even sure if "noticeably decreased battery life" is even a considerable defect.

* I had a particularly active day Monday and probably sucked the device dry between using the GPS, checking the step count, syncing the app, etc. Is it possible I wore down the battery permanently or something?

Update: I went ahead and opened a formal query with support. They had me do a factory reset and now I basically have to track the battery life cycle from 100% to 0% so they can presumably analyze the data. I'm hoping the reset will have resolved the issue. If not and the battery appears to be faulty, I'm hoping they'll do an exchange. I actually really love my Fitbit and would like to continue using the product, it's just that I was promised and used to a significantly better battery life and it's drastically declined this week.

[SunsetRunner]

In the past Fitbit had many watches that failed due to early hardware issues, just Google the internet and you will see. Is this the Ionic's turn or did you have bad luck! The Ionic's are suppose to be better made - we'll see shortly. The other Fitbit's failed around the 2-3 month timeframe.

[SunsetRunner]

I just wanted to post an update. Fitbit customer support reviewed the battery life data on their end and saw that it's malfunctioning. (It's gotten worse every day.) They're sending me a replacement at no charge, which I really appreciate. Despite this experience, I do really like the product and I have my fingers crossed that the new one will work better and for (much) longer.

[SunsetRunner]

So far your story fits the Fitbit hardware failure trend. The company always makes good under warranty but what will you do when this warranty  runs out? Why does a brand new watch need replacement already?