Charge 3 registering extra floors

[kathy89511]

My Fitbit suddenly started logging way too many floors per day starting a couple of weeks ago. For example today when I doubt I climbed more than 2 or 3 floors working around the house my Fitbit says I have climbed 112 floors! Is there a fix for this?

Moderator Edit: Clarified subject

[AlejandraFitbit]

Welcome to the Community, @kathy89511.

Your device uses both an accelerometer and altimeter to track floors, and registers a floor when detecting continuous motion combined with an elevation gain of about 10 feet.

Your device may give you credit for extra floors for a variety of reasons. Devices may track floors while doing everyday tasks such as opening doors, driving, or riding elevators or escalators, or from abrupt weather and atmospheric pressure changes Exposure to excess moisture can also result in extra floors.

If you want to remove floors from your account, you can follow the steps in the article: How do I delete steps and floors in the Fitbit app?.

Let me know how it goes.

[kathy89511]

Alejandra,

Thanks for the reply. I understand the limitations in the way that fitbit determines floors. My problem is that suddenly my fitbit is logging many more floors than it previously did. For example, between January and June I averaged around 10-20 floors per day, then abruptly in July my average increased to 115 floors per day and in August it is running at an average of 165 floors per day! My routine has not changed between Jan and August and it has been years since I climbed 330 floors in one day as my fitbit suggested I did on July 19th. Something has gone wrong with the elevation sensing device on my fitbit. Deleting this measurement does not solve the problem since I liked getting the feedback - when it actually worked!

Kathy

[pmacott]

I have been having the same problem, with extra floors suddenly being registered - to the extent that it says I have gone three floors when I wake up in the morning! 

So, if I can't trust floors, how can I be sure I can trust steps? 

And how do I fix it?

Thanks!

[KFit789]

I'm having the same issue, and it clearly began the second week of February last year. I didn't suddenly take up mountain climbing, or stadium running.

Prior to Feb 2020, I'd been logging an average of 17 floors a day. I live in a split level house, and walk up and down hills when taking walks outside. 17 is reasonable. Abruptly in Feb 2020 it jumped to an average of more than 30 floors. The oddness got hidden from April-September because, given the activity I was doing (landscaping work involving lots of work with a mattock/chopping, and walking up and down hills/holes repeatedly) it was reasonable that my "floors" would be higher than usual -- I was raising and lowering my hand a *lot* in a given day, I figured that explained the extra.

However, that has not been true since September and the problem is only getting worse. Averages: Sept = 51 floors, Oct = 65, Nov = 66, Dec = 73, Jan = 84. Just today, my FitBit is telling me that I've traversed 43 floors, which is utterly unreasonable to both the activities I have done today and to the number of steps I have taken thus far today (4500). Yesterday, a day when I did pretty close to *nothing* all day because I was sitting on the couch, it decided that I had climbed 77 flights of steps.

Is this a problem with the altimeter? Do they fail after a certain time? Or did a firmware update of some sort mess with how the altimeter in Charge 3 works? How can this be fixed, other than the workaround of manually going in and guessing how many flights of stairs I *actually* climbed in a day vs. what my FitBit thinks I did -- because if I wanted to remember and record that number myself, I wouldn't have a FitBit, I'd have a paper and pencil. The step feature seems to be fairly accurate, heart rate tracking is working as expected, just "floors" is massively off and getting worse.