Ionic Won't Hold Charge for More Than 4 Hours

[akmclaughlin]

I purchased my Ionic in February 2018 and have had consistent battery life of about 4 to 5 days before needing to recharge with all-day sync, 250 steps/hr notification and 5x/week exercise tracking usage up until two days ago when it would barely keep a charge for the day.

I did a hard reset on the watch holding down the left and bottom right buttons, I removed the watch from my Fitbit account and uninstalled the app. Then I reinstalled the app, readded the Ionic to my account, and turned off all notifications, turned off my Bluetooth so it would not auto sync my data, and turned off all alarms and did not use the watch for tracking exercise - only for mild walking during the day. The watch charged for almost 6 hours before I put it back on with all the notifications disabled, and it only lasted 4 hours before total battery depletion. Can someone help with this issue? Is there anything else I can do as it seems the battery hold life has dropped so significantly and out of the blue after over 3 years of consistent daily usage.

[Chris064]

I feel your pain. I’m in exactly the same position with battery life going from 3-4 days to 6-8 hours from a full charge. It also happened so suddenly, like I’d recently installed something but I hadn’t, I’m so frustrated. I was given the watch by my partner for my birthday in April 2019 so I’m miles out of any warranty. Reading up on replacing the battery, I'm

not sure if Fitbit provide a service option, and DIY is not recommended if you use it in water, which I never have so I may end up going down that route, but it does look rather fiddly and ripe for mistakes. 
I hope you find a solution, it’s such a shame, they are great watches and it really hasn’t missed a beat since day one. Good luck 🤞🏼 

[akmclaughlin]

UPDATE:  Even though this sounds like it's apparently a known battery defect problem, I'm outside of my "warranty window" as I purchased this back in 2018. So the only remedy was.... Sorry, here's 35% if you want to buy another FitBit product (that will probably break down in another 3 years again...)  $300 for 3 years of use seems a bit disappointing to me. Especially since it looks like they replaced the Ionic with the Sense, probably because of this very issue. Absolutely disappointing.

[SunsetRunner]

Most Lipo batteries only have a charge cycle rate of 1000-1500 times before they seriously start to break down and refuse to hold a decent charge.  I suspect there is a software switch that will monitor this and prevent the battery actually being charged up to full capacity, so it doesn't degrade to a point of total failure.There are exceptions though.

I personally would buy a new battery and have a go myself.

[akmclaughlin]

I fully expected gradual deterioration on the watch/battery life, just as we see with our phones and tablets, but this one literally came out of nowhere. Typical 4 to 5 days on a charge when my watch notified me it was low on battery so assumed it must be that time again, charged to 100%, and then dead even before lunch. Kept trying again all weekend and it just wouldn't hold. It was going strong for 3 years then pfffft. Since FitBit told me they can't help, that's our next solution to just try and replace the battery ourselves. Was just hoping for more of an explanation from their support team other than tossing a discount code my way and closing my file.

[SunsetRunner]

Yeah, customer support is probably the worse part about fitbit.  The warranty really is worthless, just a numbers game.

[MYX_spinner]

Even at the minimum number of charge cycles and charging on a daily basis, we should be getting at least 2.5 years out of the battery. That is where I am at with my watch right now (2.5 years) but, like most other people in the many posts about this issue, I was consistently getting at least 5 days per charge, which should get me over 13 years of life. While I agree that 13 years would be highly optimistic, less than 5 years based on my usage is completely unacceptable. I have had a sudden and rapid loss of charge just a few times in the past but it had always been a one-off issue and I didn't have to do anything to stop it from happening. I'm not 100% certain but I think there was always some feature I used (mainly NFC but possibly GPS once) that seemed to coincide with the discharge. My continuous, rapid-discharge issue started recently while I was on vacation. My battery was discharging at a typical rate of about 15% per day. I was watching this closely because I didn't bring my charger with me knowing that I should get at least 5 days. On the morning of day 4, my watch was dead and now it doesn't last a full day. The one similarity between this and previous occurrences was that I used mobile pay on the trip. I don't know if this is related to a firmware update but something has gone haywire with one or more high-drain functions of the watch.