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Uh, oh! 1 hearing aid isn't holding a charge!

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Edited

I just bought the Jabra 30’s last summer; received them at the end of August. For a long time the left needs to be charged sooner than the right, but it didn’t seem too bad.

I had them both charging for a long time yesterday into today. I put them in and about 1 hour and 20 minutes later, the left one is chiming that it needs to be recharged again!!

So I put it back in to charge for a while and then put it in my ear again, and so far it’s ok. But that shouldn’t have happened.

And the hard part is that the Costco’s in my city are all far away and involve a lot of difficult transportation with my husband, who is currently in the Netherlands with his brother who is dying of !!! Although he’ll be back soon.

it’s also hard to get appointments with the HA specialists who are good. Our appt that we made a while ago is 4 1/2 weeks away. If this keeps happening, I will need a much sooner appt!

Why might this be happening? If anyone knows.

Thank you!

7 people in this conversation12 min readJump to latest

Well, I spoke too soon. I am now getting the message that it needs to be charged again—arghhh!

I haven’t had the Hear In Noise channel on so, something is wrong. Grrr, I wish that the Costcos were closer and easier to get to—and that they weren’t so booked up!

To be continued . . . my husband gets back late on Saturday, just in time to get mixed up with the World Cup deluge of people going into NJ to the stadium! At least he’ll be going in the opposite direction and via train. But it may be a royal mess.

The issue here is that Jabras are exclusive to Costco and can only be serviced by them.

In the meantime, if you haven’t already, please clean the contacts on the aids and the charger.

@OcramSagev Thank you!

I did know that they can only be serviced by Costco.

I didn’t know to clean the contacts before. I just did it, and I didn’t see any dust or dirt, but maybe it wouldn’t necessarily be visible.

I think, unless this improves, I will need to get in sooner.

In reply to @OcramSagev

Yes, cleaning the contacts is always a good idea so is making sure the ’s are seating properly in the charging case. But you also need to do a hard reset.

Go to youtube and search for Jabra 30 hard reset. You may also need to reset the charging case, depending on what kind it is.

Around 90% of the time this fixes the issue. If it doesn’t, then you’ll have to go to Costco.

If you need a loaner, then you have to call them and tell them you need a loaner when you’re making your appointment. If you don’t need a loaner, call Costco (only after two hard resets), let them know you did the hard reset twice and the battery isn’t working.

Most of the time you won’t need an appointment. If the person working the desk is experienced, they can fill out the paperwork and get the HA sent in for repair. You’ll need an appointment when they come back. I used to make the appointment for two weeks from the day I sent in the bad aid to avoid delays. Generally, that worked out.

@Elderly

Thank you! I’ll have to try the hard resets and hope that that takes care of it.

PS I did the two resets, which couldn’t have been easier. Except that for the reset on the charger, I am now supposed to leave the aids in to recharge for 24 hours! I am so used to wearing them, and my hearing is so lousy, it will be a challenge to keep them in there that long!

On the other hand, the first reset of the aids might be enough. We’ll see how long I can manage without them!

If this is your first pair of hearing aids, then 24 hours is a long time.

Regular hearing aid users keep the older aids for just this reason. Backup.

Good luck!

Yes, indeed, as you rightly guessed, they are my first pair. I should have had them aeons ago, but had 4 abortive attempts with private audiologists before for assorted reasons. Thank you, you understand how hard it is to go without them now!

In reply to @Blue_Pearl1

@Elderly Thank you for the info on doing the hard resets!

I did them all several times and at first thought that took care of it. But then, the went totally dead, It wouldn’t charge or anything. So I made an appointment to get it checked out. It seemed like HA was too loose in the charger, but that may not be relevant.

The person I spoke to said that she never heard of Costco giving loaners, but said I could call back about it.

She did say maybe it’s just that the receiver needs to be changed, which, if so, would be great!

Does anyone know if Costco gives loaners if it weren’t the receiver?

Thank you!

Edited

Costco’s here do loaners if they have spares for the brand someone needs. On new brands, like the Sennheiser, they don’t have any spares or maybe only one.

It’s a decision by the specific Costco center manager.

Costco uses floaters now to answer phones instead of the dedicated HA receptionists they used to have at every HA center. Floaters don’t know much.

Bring your charger with you to your appointment.

@Elderly

Thank you. Yes, I hope that it’s just the receiver, or if not, that they have a loaner. Otherwise, I’ll be without an aid 3-4 weeks, all depending!!

When Costco did away with receptionists, at the Costco I was at previously they made the fitters do phone duty in addition to being fitters!! I was not happy, but our fitter was fairly sanguine. I would have been PO’d if it had been me. It also meant that they were even more booked up. I would think that it would make the job even less appealing.

The fitter I had before was not well trained at all through no fault of his own. I wonder if the standards are slipping. I am grateful to have found 2 more experienced fitters, and especially one, who does know a lot about molds, which I certainly need.

In reply to @Blue_Pearl1

This is why I’m really glad I use disposable batteries. You don’t have to worry about a charger breaking down or what happens if there is a power outage, etc. And then when traveling, I just take a couple extra batteries with me and all set.

I doubt it’s the receiver. The charging is done via connectors on the aids and in the charger; the receivers just don’t seem to be part of the charging system. But someone may be able to fix it at the store.

Both my wife and I have been given loaners at various times. I had a pair just 3 months ago. If they have them, they’ve given them to us, but the supply is limited, so they’ve been loaned out when we needed them at times. (We have 20+ years of being Costco customers, so we’ve had a number of opportunities to use loaners.)

I’m surprised and disappointed that you have to wait to get attention. I think a person with non-working HAs should be prioritized over people buying new HAs, sort of like emergency cases can throw off an MD’s appointment schedule. But they HA depts I’ve seen recently are so busy, they don’t have time or staff to take care of the demand.

My Costco goes back and forth on HA reception. Now there’s a permanent staff member, but she’s in training as a(n) , so she’ll start sitting at the desk part-time in the future. If they can’t get staff, they can’t get staff. The demographics and economics are against us.

@philbob57 @testing123

Arghh! As I mentioned, when I made the appointment for Friday am, I told them that if the fitter can’t fix the aid, I would need a loaner. The fitter I was speaking with hadn’t heard of loaners being given out. I called today and left a message for the fitter I will be seeing to that effect.

Otherwise, I’ll be 2-4 weeks with only 1 aid!!

Today, I was in a cab and could only make out some of the words the driver was saying!! Utterly frustrating.

As it is, I struggle mightily to hear with both aids!

I need to get new molds made (that’s for another topic).

It just so happened that this week I have been completely booked up with doctor appointments, etc., and they are booked up for many months, so I can’t just cancel. Yeesh.

I see what you guys with disposable batteries mean. But I’d do poorly with those, I think, because I have bad neuropathy in my hands/fingers. The joys of getting older with conditions. OTOH, my brother-in-law is declining badly with , so I count my blessings in spite of the trials.

In reply to @philbob57

@philbob57

I just saw a vm back from Costco from this afternoon, that I didn’t see before. They have no loaners now of any brand; they all are out. I could try calling some other Costcos tomorrow, but transportation is an issue now. Out car is in the shop, so that makes at least one of the two very difficult to get to.

I will go tomorrow to at least have the problematic aid sent in. But I also wonder about the charger, as that aid is slightly loose in the charger. But if I sent that back, also, I would have no aidsat all for many weeks!! It’s discouraging to say the least.

For me, this is one of the big downsides of Costco, they are quite difficult to get to, and I can’t go on my own (my husband has to go with me, which he doesn’t mind, but it’s a lot).

I’ve worked really hard to make these aids work for me, and I still have a long way to go. The molds never worked properly, maybe because of my ear canals. I will address that in a separate post, as it’s its own subject.

Don’t give up hope. Someone at our store has fixed charging problems in my wife’s HS10s a couple of times. I know Jabras aren’t KS10s, but … don’t give up hope.

I strongly recommend taking both aids and charger and charger power cable in with you.

Best of luck!

Sorry, I didn’t read the full thread, but I want to add that I did experience a rapid battery failure on fairly new Phonak Spheres.

Within a week one went from normal battery drain over the course of the day, to being depleted by mid morning.

Phonak replaced the battery (or entire HA, I don’t know) and all was good again.

I think this was simply a manufacturing defect with the battery.

It can happen!

In reply to @philbob57

@philbob57 @wtolkien

Thank you! @philbob57 that is good thinking to bring the charging cable, too.

So, I went today, and we had to go via subway with delays noted in almost all of the various ways to get there.

Various things went wrong, as things are won’t to do, ie, my subway card didn’t work, so we missed the train I intended to get, etc. Then, the train we were going to get wasn’t working, so we got out and took a cab. As a result we were huffing and puffing for train transfers, and the walk from the train, and we were 15 minutes late!

Well, she was running late, thankfully. In fact more than an hour after we got there.

But the good news is, that it turned out that the problem was there was wax inside the mold where the receiver is, so cleaning it out made it work again—yeah!!!

Then, she asked how my hearing was with the aids, and I said that I still really struggle to hear. It turns out that when I got the molds that I have (my second set of molds), the fitter who is the most experienced with molds, apparently forgot to change the fitting for the new molds!! That was February 16th for Pete’s sake!! All this time I thought that the problem was that the molds don’t work and needed to be remade, which is still true for other reasons. But now I hear much better as a result.

I hadn’t been back, because I had been back and forth to various Costco’s repeatedly for many months, so I needed to catch up with other medical needs. I already have appointments in the end of June and July to get new molds made and picked up.

But I have to say, for both my husband and I, all of this running around to hard to get to Costco’s is too much!! However, I am in the middle of it all, so I won’t change course in the middle. And who knows if I went to a private audiologist, or, better yet, a University hospital office, would the Audi be really good with molds??

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