I am currently trialing the More Ones and although the connectivity issue is annoying, the themselves are so much better than my previous ones I am going to go ahead and purchase them anyway (although convenient I can live without the streaming). They come with the standard desk charger (that I have been using for the past month) or I can pay an upgrade to get the smart charger instead. The smart charger seems like it would be a lot more convenient for travel, but I’m wondering if there is a downside to the smart charger that I am missing?
I have both the desktop and the smart charger and find that I use both at different times. The smart charger can go with me if I feel I may need to charge my aids. The desk charger is on my home office desk and serves its purpose.
@cvkemp thanks for the response. Can I ask which you would choose if you could only have 1? I don’t want to pay for both right now, so am debating which one would be more useful for me. I’m wondering if there is anything with the desk charger that I would be missing if I go with the smart charger.
The smart charger seems like it would be a lot more convenient for travel, but I’m wondering if there is a downside to the smart charger that I am missing?
@Chirp: Unless you’re doing a lot of traveling, you’re going to have to worry about the batteries in the smart charger reaching the end of their service life in 3 years or so (if you’re traveling, then I giess the price premium is just an extra, travel-related expense) . I’m not sure they’re replaceable and if they are, what the cost would be.
You can get a battery pack to use with the desk charger. Mine gives me 8+ days of charges. The SmartCharger gives 3+. And it’s dear. But - in its favour - it’s a pretty slick little unit, and easy to grab and take with you if an emergency arises. (BTW, I don’t buy the “dehumidifier” claim - it’s just residual heat from the charging process, and would be the same for the “desk” unit.)
I also use them both, when I am home… When I travel it is just way more convenient to have the smart charger because it also dehumidifies, protects/stores the , and offers three extra charges. The downside of the smart charger would be something I can only guess, such as reliability and lifespan of the power bank. If offered the choice, I would pick the smart charger every time though.
@SpudGunner: I was thinking about the OP question again. I guess the smart charger does pretty much everything the wall charger does. And even if the power bank fails, the smart charger would still be a better wall charger than the old model.
Problem is Oticon charging us extra $$$ for the newer, more portable version. Anyways, just one more deplorable move from Oticon. Like you, I was not offered the disposable battery version, had to pay extra for a decent charger, and am doing lots of yoga and meditation to forget about the mess they made with the bluetooth . I feel cheated.
to forget about the mess they made with the bluetooth . I feel cheated.
@e1405: See, I can’t comment on the Bluetooth problem because I have no connectivity problems because I’m only paired with my iPhone SE, and that connection has always been stable as a rock …
[Wait! Listen!! Is that the sound of the “Velusiomobile” revving its turbine?]
The smart charger seems like it would be a lot more convenient for travel, but I’m wondering if there is a downside to the smart charger that I am missing?
First, let me qualify that I only own an OPN 1 pair of , so I don’t have personal experience with the More chargers. I can only speak from common sense.
Like @SpudGunner mentioned to you before, the most obvious downside is that here’s yet another device with a built-in battery that will fail eventually, and it doesn’t look like its battery can be easily replaceable by the user. Knowing about Oticon’s policy on the ConnectClip, they don’t provide a battery replacement service for the ConnectClip officially. If its battery goes bad, you have to buy another ConnectClip or figure out how to replace the battery yourself via from eBay batteries.
Lithium-ion batteries don’t like to stay at full 100% state or at nearly depleted state for a long time. It’s only in its happiest state when it’s around 50% charged. If you keep the SmartCharger plugged in all the times at home so that you can have a max of 3 day charging when you’re on the go, then it’d be in a full state of charge day-in-day-out in order to be all full on the ready → not good for its battery. So you’d want to keep unplugging it when it’s full, use it for 3 charges, then plug it back in, in order to cycle through the uses to maximize its battery longevity. Or even go to the extreme and charge it to only 2 out of 3 dots, then recharge again from 1 dot to 2 dots (which would require timing the charge), if you really, really want to optimize its battery longevity. But that would be too much of a hassle. So if you want it to be a worry-free experience, you just got to accept that it wouldn’t last you longer past its warranty period, whenever that is (is it 3 years like with the HAs?), then have to buy a brand new one because Oticon doesn’t have a battery replacement policy on it.
Secondly, I also agree with @SpudGunner that the humidity feature is BS. They’re trying to spin a negative into a positive there. If you close the lid and charge, the heat build up from its internal battery dispensing the juice can heat up the batteries inside the More HAs, and we all know that heat is the enemy of Lithium-ion battery. So while charging in the SmartCharger, I’d rather keep the lid open to air out the Mores instead of closing the lid to trap in the moisture and build up the heat. You can’t dehumidify if the moisture is trapped in by the close lid. If you open the lid, the built-up heat will escape, negating having enough heat to dehumidify anything in the first place. Of course if you’re charging on the go then you want to close the lid. Or if you have pets at home that can eat your HAs if you don’t close the lid.
Thanks everyone for the comments! I had not considered the issue of the battery dying over time. As long as the charger doesn’t need to be closed to charge, I could keep it open most of the time when charging. On the issue of the battery dying, I wonder if you could still plug it in if to charge if the battery was no longer working. I’m assuming you could, but I’m not certain. If so, wouldn’t I be back to essentially having a ‘desk charger’ at that point?
@Chirp : @Volusiano can answer your question definitively, but my common sense tells me that the chip/circuit that negotiates charge voltages/amperage with your expensive hearing aids needs a functioning battery pack to operate properly. But - I’m no tech guru, and I stand to be corrected if I’m wrong.
If I remember correctly, it takes 4 hours to fully charge a depleted SmartCharger alone, and 8 hours to fully charge a depleted SmartCharger with depleted in there, so that implies that you can still use it as a plugged in charger even if the battery is depleted. So in general, we would think that it can become the equivalent of the plugged-in charger once its battery is depleted. But a depleted battery is different than a failed/dead battery.
We really don’t know if Oticon designed any kind of fail safe in it to disallow charging once it finds the voltage of the SmartCharger battery below a certain threshold voltage, as a safety measure. If they do have a disable switch in there, that disable switch may kill the charging of the HAs as well in parallel with killing the charging of the SmartCharger battery. That would be an interesting question to ask Oticon Support or have the ask them.
I know for Lithium-ion rechargeable batteries such as the Ryobi batteries, their built in circuitry (inside the battery design, not inside the charger) is designed to disconnect and not allowing any kind of charging altogether once their battery pack is “dead” (below a minimum threshold voltage) as a safety measure. There are plenty of YouTube trick videos showing people how to jumpstart the dead battery pack to past a threshold level so that the safety circuit can allow charging again. So it’s not far fetched to imagine Oticon designing their SmartCharger to disallow charging its battery for good once it’s dead (meaning below a threshold voltage). And if the charging of the HAs is conditional on being able to charge the SmartCharger battery, then it’s possible that you can’t use a dead SmartCharger as a dumb plugged-in charger. Otherwise it wouldn’t be called a SmartCharger in the first place. There’s really not much smart about the charging process. Usually the smart is in the availability of safety circuitry to make the device smartly safe. But I’m just speculating here.
But a depleted battery is different than a failed/dead battery.
@Volusiano: Did you not once describe, in some detail (I’m pretty sure it was you …) how there is an ongoing dialogue between the charger and the chargee that defines the optimal voltage and amperage for a given state of chargee discharge and battery health? That being the case, if the chargees are simultaneously the and the battery pack in the charger, would not a DOA battery in either half of the chargee configuration create a null condition for the chip, which would then prevent the power supply from connecting to the Li-on batteries of eitherchargee by virtue of a kill circuit hardwired onto the controller chip?
@SpudGunner → maybe you’re referring to my mention of the typical CC/CV charging process (Constant Current / Constant Voltage) for Lithium-ion batteries. See below for an example. As you can see in the example, with a depleted battery, the voltage of the battery (or battery pack) is lower than normal. The “state of charge” is usually determine by measuring the voltage across the battery terminals. A low voltage, but not at 0V, but at a certain acceptable level of voltage, indicates a depleted battery. At a certain (higher voltage), it indicates a full battery.
The way a typical charging cycle works for CC/CV is that the charger will pump a constant amount of current into the battery and observes the voltage. As this constant amount of current is pumped into the battery, the voltage starts to rise. Then at some point when the voltage is high enough, the charger will stop pushing the constant current through, but instead will now hold the voltage constant at that level, and let the battery take in whatever current it needs from that point on. As the battery gets full, it takes in less and less current until a minimal current draw is reached, at which point the charging is stopped.
In the example below, orange is the current, blue is the voltage. the left Y axis is the voltage values, the right side Y axis is the current value, the x axis is the elapsed charging time.
This process is probably what you mentioned above as the “ongoing dialogue” between the charger and chargee (aka the battery). Moving on to your question about if one of the chargees (there are 2 here, the batteries being one “pack”, and the charger battery being the other pack) is dead, wouldn’t the dead half basically triggers the “disconnect” safety circuit such that charging is disallowed altogether for both packs? → the answer is I don’t know because I didn’t design the SmartCharger.
You’re assuming here that there is only 1 charging circuit (when plugged in), and it’s charging both the 2 packs together in a parallel fashion. It may or may not be true. Oticon could have designed 2 chargers in series as well. Maybe it’s a 2 stage design where the first stage is the plug in the wall charger charging the SmartCharger battery, then the juice in this battery, if available, is used to power the second stage charger that charges the HAs’ batteries. This would have been a more sensible design in my opinion, because if there’s no plug in the wall, and the SmartCharger battery has some juice, then it’s still powering the phase 2 charger to charge the HA batteries, even when the first stage charger sits idle as it’s not plugged in.
But again, since we didn’t design it, we don’t know and can only speculate. Nevertheless, in this scenario, if it’s truly a series operation with 2 chargers, a dead SmartCharger battery can very well trigger the safety circuit to open up and not accept any charge from the first phase charger. In this case, the second stage charging may never happen. It can be some kind of a hybrid charger as well, where there’s 1 charger used to charge both packs, but maybe not necessarily in parallel, but in some kind of hybrid parallel/series fashion. We just don’t know.
Now let’s say if it were a 2-stage 2-chargers design, then I’m guessing the 2 chargers can operate in series, but simultaneously as well. It’s kind of like a 2-bowl cascading water fall. The wall power pours water (current in this case) into the first bowl (the Smartcharger battery), and the first bowl is filled up, and as it begins to fill up, it can also begin “pouring” (charging) water (current) into the second bowl (the HA batteries). This is assuming that the spigot in the first (top) bowl (which is pouring water into the second bowl) is near the bottom of the bowl,
The spec says it takes 4 hours to charge a fully depleted SmartCharger battery. The spec also says that it takes 3 hours to charger a fully depleted pair of HAs from the SmartCharger. Yet the spec says that it takes 8 hours total to charge a full depleted SmartCharger battery and a fully depleted HA batteries together. So why not 7 hours or less, because even if it’s fully in series, 4 + 3 = 7 hours? If it’s a cascading effect as described above, it can potentially be even 3 hours, because any current poured into the first bowl can spill right away down to the second bowl as long as the spigot is at the bottom of the bowl, right? But of course it’s just an analogy, and maybe there are safety measures in place that makes the water percolate through the layers of filters in each bowl instead of forcing an instant dump, which explains a slower combined charging time together.
I guess I’m getting too far ahead of myself here anyway, but hopefully that answers parts of your question.
@Volusiano: WOW! This design scenario and its permutations is much trickier than I imagined.
My apprehension is vindicated, however: I feel that it’s too simplistic to just assume that once the battery pack in the SmartCharger goes to Li-ion heaven, we’re just left with a “plug-it-in-and-it-charges-my--anyway” “DumbCharger”.
Yeah, maybe somebody with Lithium-ion charging design can chime in. Although I’m a EE by trade, I’m not an expert in battery charging design.
My first reactive reasoning was that if a computer laptop has a dead battery, and even if you remove the battery, it should still power the laptop just fine. So why wouldn’t the SmartCharger to do the same? But then this is not quite the same. There are 2 separate battery systems here, and one battery is charging the other.
But then a very similar scenario is the Apple AirPods design. I think if you have a dead case and dead AirPods, when you plug power to the case, all energy is directed to charge the AirPods until full, then the remaining power will be directed to charge up the case afterward. If the Oticon SmartCharger is designed this way, then it’s possible to use it as a dummy charger plugged into the wall all the times.
So maybe it’s much simpler than we thought.
But then again, a fully depleted AirPods case is not the same as a completely dead, non-rechargeable case. I don’t know if it’d still work the same way. Anyone with a completely dead, non-rechargeable AirPods case care to chime in?
@Volusiano: I don’t want to make a mountain out of a molehill. I just thought that @Chirp might be letting himself in for an expensive disappointment by assuming that a “dead” SmartCharger would still work to charge if its own batteries were shot. I feel vindicated for my caution - I think it is warranted - at least enough caution to ask Oticon for the straight goods. Then he can decide on which charger he wants to buy with some basis in facts.
Hot Springs Village, Arkansas
Oticonian/Disposablyte
. I feel cheated.
. I feel cheated.
