Ww Scale Battery Change

[Latrina Mosely]

Had same issue, called customer service and they sent the new replacement scale and told me to keep the old one and recycle which was great. I got the black one instead of white original purchase, not a huge issue but the first thing I did was removed the installed battery and used duracell batteries instead so it wont get stuck again, hopefully.

Update: my new scale arrived already! Less than 36 hours after I was struggling to remove the stuck battery, Wyze customer service has replaced my old scale with a brand-new, up-and-running scale. THANK YOU, WYZE

Same problem here with the battery stuck inside. I was able to get it out with a pocket knife pushed into the battery skin on an angle with one hand, and tapping the pocket knife with my other hand. Tapping sounds lighter than it is, it took a little work. But it came out!

Alkaline batteries contain an electrolyte, which is a mixture of potassium hydroxide and water, that reacts with the zinc and manganese dioxide electrodes inside the battery to produce electrical energy.

When the battery is in use, the electrolyte solution can become heated due to the electrochemical reactions occurring inside the battery. As the battery is used up and its energy is depleted, the electrolyte solution can become more concentrated and the pressure inside the battery can increase.

I used a cuticle pusher and wedged it into the side so that it is squeezing the side of the battery against the plastic. Then I pulled the cuticle pusher along with the battery out of the opening. The friction provided enough grip to force the battery out.

I'm having trouble with my Aria always showing a low battery signal. I've replaced the batteries a couple of times and when I checked the power strip on the batteries themselves they show that they're at full.

@pcooney001 @Adionne @kennymac44 Welcome to the Fitbit Community! It's great to have you here! The workaround that you did, which is changing the batteries is a great way to fix this issue. However, since it did not fix it for you, I recommend cleaning the contacts of your scale, where the batteries are placed with a cotton swab and a little bit of alcohol.

I am having the same problem also. I had to change the batteries when I took the unit out of the package and have had to change the batteries weekly since then (only a month). I believe I have a defective unit. I have another unit at my other home and it is working fine.

@mauilover93 Thanks for joining our Community! I'd like to know if you tried the workaround I recommended in my post above. Basically, you can try cleaning the contacts of your scale with a cotton swab and a little bit of alcohol. If the issue persists, I suggest you to contact our Customer Support team so they can assist you further.

After reading all the comments on this board, I decided to contact Customer Service. The rep was very polite and very helpful. He asked me to check one thing (battery contacts & springs). When I confirmed they were fine, he immediately took my information so that he could send me a replacement. It will take about 5 days, but based on what I've read, the replacement should do the trick. Kudos to Fitbit!

While my battery life was better earlier, though not that good even then, now it is very bad. The last time i changed the batteries i used the scale about 5 times and didnt use for 23 days. The batteries were completely dead when i tried after this. Hence, the brand new batteries had a life of only 5 weighings.

I wonder if this is a manufacturing/ design defect as it appears that many users have this problem. What is the solution other than scrapping the Aria and buying another weighing scale? My scale is past the warranty period.

@CPMammen Thanks for joining us in this thread! and best regards to Germany @Lupla! So sorry to hear that the batteries you have placed in your Aria scales have not lasted as long as they should. Please try cleaning the contacts of the scale, where the batteries are placed with a cotton swab and a little bit of alcohol. After this, place the batteries back in and test the batteries behavior the next 48 hours.

@CPMammen So sorry to hear that your Aria scale is still experiencing issues with the batteries. I have forwarded your case to our Support team and they'll be happy to assist you further and provide a solution. You should receive an email from them soon.

@ocmhoribe Thanks for participating in our Fitbit Community! Have you tried cleaning the contacts? If not, please take out the batteries, clean the contacts of the scale with alcohol and a cotton swab. This will remove dust and test the batteries' lifespan.

Emma, let's start with you. You worked at a battery company before jumping to this startup. Let's walk through a few basics here. Let's just start with this question. If I'm an investor and I want to build a big battery and attach it to the grid, how would I make money? What are the sort of routes through which I could make income with a battery?

So batteries typically have three ways in which they make money. The first one is, I think, what everyone traditionally thinks of a battery doing, and it's called energy arbitrage. And basically that just means that a battery buys power when the price is low and it sells power when the price is high.

And the difference between those prices is what the battery is paid. Of course, some energy is lost through the process of storing it, and so batteries are not 100% efficient. So that's kind of the traditional idea of how batteries operate. But that's actually not really what a lot of batteries are doing on the grid today. Instead they provide what are called ancillary services and those are basically products that help to keep the grid frequency at 60 Hz. It's really important for reliability, just in everyday power grid operations, that that happens and the grid operates more efficiently when it's in a tighter band, around 60 Hz.

Exactly. And just much more efficient. So that's the second revenue stream available to batteries and then the third is what's called capacity revenue. And this is not available in every market, but it's basically available in every deregulated market outside of Texas. And it's like long-term grid planning. So the grid operator looks at the expected demand forecast on the time horizons of years rather than days or weeks and determines how much power plant generation capacity it's going to need to satisfy that demand in the future. Then it creates a market to establish the price of what basically it costs to bring new generation online to meet that demand and also to satisfy power plants that are retiring and going offline and that we need to backfill. So that is another service that batteries can offer.

And you mentioned this, but maybe it's worth clarifying a little bit. Capacity payments are obviously only available in areas with capacity markets, so that is restructured areas other than Texas. Because as Volts listeners may or may not know, Texas has this energy only market with no capacity market. So what about in areas where there are still vertically integrated old school utilities? Can batteries make money in those areas, and is it the same way?

So that's actually a really good question. And there's a lot less transparency in vertically integrated markets, so it's not obvious to say exactly what batteries are doing. And basically the utility decides the operating mode of the battery. And I think the biggest distinction between vertically integrated and deregulated markets are that in vertically integrated markets, utilities can rate base the cost of bringing new generation online, whereby in deregulated markets that has to be supported by the fundamental economics of the power market. And that's why deregulated markets are so good at getting lowest cost dispatch. And that was why basically they deregulated in the 90s. It's basically that batteries functionally do the same thing, they're providing frequency services and probably doing some energy arbitrage and are online for capacity in vertically integrated markets. There's just much less transparency on how they're being paid and how much of that is essentially being subsidized by rate payers.

And let's just say a little word about grid services, because, as we mentioned, it's very cool that batteries can provide these services, sort of voltage regulation and stuff like this, but I think people should understand that this is not a large burgeoning market. Like the actual demand for grid services is relatively limited and close to being saturated now. Or sort of like how much headroom is there in that particular slice of the market?

It's a little bit of a moving target because the grid operator, ERCOT, can move around the quantity of those services that it procures, and that's actually changed a bit. They've released a new ancillary product in ERCOT this summer, so it's not exactly a certainty. But I think certainly in the next two to three years, we'll see some significant price pressure on those services. One thing I just want to note here is that when we talk about batteries getting compensated, it's not a clear cut "batteries can win in these markets with respect to paying back their costs."

A lot of batteries actually struggle to make enough revenue to meet their break-even hurdle. This is just one more pressure on the product that's been keeping them afloat in the past couple of years. So I think this is really concerning to developers and they're sort of looking for new ways to compensate storage for the services that it provides.

Right, yeah, I was sort of getting around to that. The grid services market is relatively close to saturated, let's say, but if that's true, then it's definitely going to be saturated well before we get anywhere close to the amount of storage we think we're going to need to decarbonize. So this is not going to be a big driver of additional battery deployment. And as you say, like, just in general, and you made this point to me when we talked earlier, Emma, it's just very difficult, even today for batteries to make money, period. For all the sort of talk about batteries and how much batteries we need and the sort of gigantic quantities of storage we're talking about needing, it's very difficult for them to make money in today's market.

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