The good news is that most of these are a cleaning job. The ring sits on a finger all day collecting skin oils, soap and hand cream, and those end up exactly where the electrical contacts are.
- 1
Clean both sets of contacts
A dry lint-free cloth on the metal contacts inside the ring and on the pins in the charger. This resolves the majority of cases on its own.
If there is visible residue, a barely damp cloth followed by thorough drying. Nothing abrasive, and nothing conductive near the pins.
- 2
Seat it the right way round
The contacts have to meet. There is a correct orientation and it is genuinely easy to get wrong, particularly at night. You should see a charging indication in the app within about a minute; if not, lift it and reseat it rather than leaving it and hoping.
- 3
Try a different power source
Swap the cable and the plug. Laptop USB ports and low-output chargers are a common cause of very slow or stalled charging, and a cable that charges a phone fine can still be faulty.
- 4
Give it fifteen minutes from properly flat
A completely drained ring can take a few minutes before it shows any sign of life. Do not judge it in the first sixty seconds.
- 5
Check whether it is the app rather than the ring
Sometimes the ring is charging fine and the app is not reporting it, which is a sync problem wearing a charging problem’s clothes. See Oura Ring not syncing if the ring seems to work but the app disagrees.
When it is the battery, not you
Ring batteries are small, sealed and not user-replaceable, and they degrade with charge cycles like every other lithium cell. A ring a few years old whose runtime has fallen from several days to under one is showing normal ageing rather than a defect.
That is worth knowing before you spend an evening cleaning contacts. It is also worth factoring into the cost of ownership: a ring is a device with a lifespan, not a permanent purchase, which changes the three-year arithmetic in is the Oura Ring worth it.
Before you start a warranty claim
Export your data. It lives on the web at membership.ouraring.com and works regardless of the ring’s state, so a replacement process cannot cost you your history: how to export your Oura data.