Calories burnt on Surge vs Charge HR

[KarrieS19]

Hello 

I own a Charge HR and my boyfriend owns a Surge. I changed all his settings including sex, weight etc to be the same as mine as an experiment. He never used his and its new. The only difference is I have the Surge set as dominant hand and the Charge on my non dominant hand. I wore them each on the appropriate hand when I worked out. I did 3 30 minute cardio workouts and the Surge shows double the calories burnt. Which is accurate. I am 5'5" 170lbs. My Charge HR says 224 calories burnt and the Surge says 450 calories both show a similar heart rate of 128-129 avg. 

Any insight would be great 

[YojanaFitbit]

Hey there @KarrieS19! Thanks for reaching us today, welcome to the Forums! That's a good experiment. 

I'm glad you come here to seek for information about how they track calories. In theory, all trackers works in the same way, since all of them uses a pedometer that count your steps. Well, first of all is that for you to have the same information using only the pedometer you should be using both tracker on the same hand so you they can sense the same movements.

Have two different accounts was a great idea, since you changed your boyfriend's info to match with yours. But, Fitbit Charge HR and Surge has different feature and similar ones too. Charge HR has auto detection (SmartTrack) and Surge has the Multi-Sport too. That's why I'd like to have a little of more details in regards how they are tracking information. To do so, please go to a computer and access to the Fitbit.com Dashboard, click on "Log" then "Activities". Change the view to calories and check the record for the Activity History, it will give us a clue on how both tracked those calories. It will look like this:

Please note that even you compare them trackers not always give exactly the same amount of steps which is the basic to get calories. If you can attach those screen shots it's would be great!

Have a good one!