Ionic - sudden battery drain at the 4th day

[Colinm39]

I have created this topic because I can't find similar in the Ionic Forum and wondering if others had a similar problem and solved.  When reading this keep in mind that the first 4 days are perfect at a discharge rate of about 0.47%/hour

Background

• 3 months old
• Wear 24/7 between charges
• HR set to auto
• Manual awake
• Ionic clock face
• Heavy use of Fitbit Pay
• All notifications set and work
• No notifications while asleep
• No GPS just the odd Workout
• No music
• mainly domestics and shopping activity averaging 0.47% drainage for 4 days
• only two alarms 3 times a week
• Phone turned off while asleep
• No background sync set
• App 2.74.2 fixed all phone data and phone battery
• syncing not an issue
• Always charged on the Toshiba Laptop USB port.
• For the first couple of months I was getting 5.5-7.5 days out of a battery with 80% battery drain,..a typical 0.45% average drain/hour..

Three charges ago (12th July) there was sudden drain during the 4th day on each occasion

• First while asleep from 58% to dead flat
• Second while watching TV from 62% to near flat in 2 hours
• Thirdly today from 3:00pm @ 56% now 18% while watching TV and evening meal and dropping rapidly

Fitbit Support are involved via email and have all of the details from each failure including tonight's..

Support  requested a factory reset after the 2nd failure. That went smoothly with a full Ionic WiFi update in 35 minutes. So this 3rd failure is after the Factory reset.  No change, still fails

Edited... Now charging from 15% after 3 x restarts... and at 30 minutes the Ionic is now @ 43%, so about 1%/minute of recharged battery..

[Colinm39]

@jjoonathanThanks for the response.. This Ionic is only 3 months old. It was a new replacement for a 6 month Ionic which refused to connect to the GPS.. So the way the US Fitbit warranty reads I'm 9 months into a 12 months warranty period because of the replacement.  In Australia it looks like I now have 2 years because Fitbit warranty didn't comply with our consumer laws..  See this link

Fitbit have responded for me over the years.. The Ionic only took 3 days from OS to Australia and I have a Blaze replaced with a scratched screen and a Surge because they send the wrong band size.. All excellent service.

I find if you build your case you seem to have reasonable success and now that I have an Australian warranty it could be better..

I did the 3 restarts before this recharge and so far it's only using 0.36%/hr instead of 0.47%/hr.. so we will see...

I have a new phone sitting in my draw because the older phone was at about 2 years on the battery and it was over heating.. My Telco was perplexed so we assumed it was the "2 year lithium battery issue" and there was a financial gain to upgrade, not knowing then the battery issue was an App issue on the Androids...

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@jjoonathan wrote:

Fitbit ionics are dropping like flies to the 8 month battery plague. Contact support ASAP because the process of obtaining a replacement is slow and exhausting. If they honor their warranty at all. In my case, they found an excuse to wriggle out of it, leaving me high and dry with a $300 brick. I hope you have better luck than I did.

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[mfc-sge2]

Support have contacted me and when I'm ready they want me to send my Ionic less bands and cable to our Australian distributor for testing.. They have accepted that the sudden drain of battery near the 4th day is odd and they want it checked..  I have kept my mac address to see if it's just a replacement.

This is posted by @Colinm39 from another account while I get ready to continue my Fitbit journey without my Ionic

[Colinm39]

I'm at the 4th day with 56% of battery left.. This was a charge after 3 consecutive restarts.

The Ionic is consuming 0.47%/hr since charging with 24/7 and only domestics, shopping and spurts of walking.

So far, so good....

[Colinm39]

Success.after the 3 successive restarts before charging a few days ago.. The Ionic is at 13% after 7.5 days and now being recharged. The this full charge will be the litmus test and it's recharging at 1%/minute while I type this..

The image below shows the discharge rates/hour

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@Colinm39 wrote:

I'm at the 4th day with 56% of battery left.. This was a charge after 3 consecutive restarts.

The Ionic is consuming 0.47%/hr since charging with 24/7 and only domestics, shopping and spurts of walking.

So far, so good....

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[Colinm39]

An update on my sudden discharging. since a month ago when I was getting discharges every 4 days.

Why am I doing this ?.. Australia now have a 2 year manufacturers warranty with our consumer laws and I can't prove there is an issue because I get over 5 days before the meltdown.. Support say it's within the design limits.. and everything else works.  It's in the hands of Support with this latest finding added to the previous meltdowns.

Since the 3 restarts I have only had 2 sudden discharges to dead flat in a month.. wearing 24/7, no change to all notifications, alarms, weather etc.. and a Fitbit clock.  Syncing concurrent in multi mode works for me.

Today I was fortunate to be in the house and doing some desk work and I noticed the Ionic started to discharge at the rate of 1% every 5 minutes and accelerating. This was after 4 days use after charging to 100%.. The charge went from 58% to 33% a total of 25% in 4 hours..  I was lucky I caught the discharge at 33% remaining.

So I turned the Ionic off, restarted it, and in the last 7 hours it's only lost 2% at an average of 0.28%/hr. This is better than my typical hourly average of a discharge of 0.47%/hr over an average battery charge life of 6.7 days and recharging at around 20% remaining.

I  will see what it's like in the morning and report back because I added another variable, I uninstalled Strava and Coach because I don't use them. Deeza has always been uninstalled..... So I continue testing.

It seems to point to operating system issues because I have also monitored the Background Mobile data issue which "leaks" when the Fitbit Background option is set to Off...  That doesn't seem to be aggressive since our melt down a few weeks ago.

Mobile data usage with Background data OFF.. as a percentage of the total of the Android Mobile data usage

Period

21may – 20jun        7.8%

21jun – 20jul           34.1%      when we had the Fitbit meltdown  

21jul   - 20Aug         8.2%

21aug – 21aug      19.6%   Not enough data here and that is now 17.6%...dropping..

Today's data usage  and it's the start of a new monthly billing cycle.

[Colinm39]

Nearly 24 hours on since the Ionic restart in the middle of a battery meltdown and the discharge rate has remained constant.. Now at 25% and 5 days and the low battery warning. At this rate I will get at least another 24 hours.  No top up charging.

I will continue testing this because...... if a simple restart arrested the battery meltdown at about 4 days it is definitely pointing to something in the OS

In the graph the Green cumulative discharge rate hardly gets a blip because of the averaging. but the periodical logging shows the drop.

[Colinm39]

An update on this phenomenon....

Since August 22nd from my last sudden discharge I have had 2 good charged periods and this one, again, had a sudden discharge at 4.96 days . Again I arrested by turning off the Ionic and restarting .. Achieved another 2 days.  The total was 6.96 days.  The average since 22nd August was 6.51 days for 3 x full charges via the USB port on the computer.