Fitbit Versa - Battery drain and Inaccurate Heart Rate Monitor

[FitNTuff]

G'day everyone, 

New Fitbit user here 🙂 

Received my Fitbit Versa a coupla days ago and was super excited... at first. 

Day 1: Charged my Versa 100% and experimented a lot with it. Compared heart rate readings with Polar H10. Sometimes, they matched, sometimes they didn't. I put it down to calibration error as sometimes new devices will calibrate themselves over a period of time. However, the biggest disappointment was with the battery life. Down to 0% in a matter of hours. Charged it to 100% and was wore it to bed. I wake up in the morning and my Versa had gone dead. Flat battery and it had logged just over 4 hours of sleep. Nice!

Day 2: Wore it to workout and once I go beyond my warm up routine, it Fitbit's readings quickly deviate from Polar H10's. Later, I googled "how to prolong Fitbit Versa battery life" and proceeded to disable as many features as possible. Defeats the purpose of wearing an activity tracker, but Ok... hopefully this would fix the battery drain issue. Nope. Just lasted a few extra minutes and back to 0% it was! Tried resetting it, did a factory reset and all that. No luck after doing that either. 

Day 3: Wore a fully charged Versa to my workout and then compared heart rate with that shown by Polar H10. At rest, Fitbit seems to be in the vicinity (+/- 4 to 6 bpm variance). However, once I begin moving the reading seems way off. My Polar reading was at 175-176bpm but Fitbit hovered at around 120bpm. BTW, battery level today too plummeted rapidly. Not sure if this is an isolated case or if others have experienced something similar? Any suggestions at all? 

Thanks 🙂 

[UnicornGlitter]

I’ve come to the conclusion FitBits are generally incredibly inaccurate and develop software issues after about a year. I first had a FitBit Charge 2 with instant replacement care. After 8 months, notifications stopped working, my heart rate was all over the shop and it needed charging everyday. I upgraded to the Versa. I’ve had it almost a year and it’s inaccurate. It doesn’t log my sleep, it doesn’t log my exercises, my cardio fitness level jumps from very good to fair every couple of days or so. It says my resting heart rate is 74bpm when it’s actually 60bpm. It also doesn’t record my heart rate accurately during cardio if at all which could affect my fitness levels. Last night I did a work out it showed my heart rate as 127bpm and decreasing the harder I worked, then it would stop recording then it would jump up to 173bpm. I checked my Versa the last exercise it logged was Monday and my fitness level decreased again. I’ve read other posters switching to Garmin and the figures have been more accurate and stable. I’m contacting the retailer to see if the issues I’m having is enough to replace it with Garmin. 

[FitNTuff]

@UnicornGlitter , Thanks for sharing your experience. Looks like I might I have to send mine back. The primary reason I got this was to track my Heart Rate throughout the day and for its sleep tracking features. If these two are off, there's not much point to it for me. Seriously considering Samsung Galaxy Watch Active 2. Reviews on Youtube are raving about it. 

For my workouts, I have my tried and trusted Polar H10. 

Here's hoping your replacement works out for you.