Battery life of your hearing aids?

Just killed the first set. 11 days. surprisingly, the left one crapped out first. I just went ahead and changed both of them. !! DAYS!!! That is at least 5 battery changes on my old set! Thanks Phonak!
Dan

This time 12 days
A bit more bluetooth

13 days . Last night I changed batteries.

https://forum.hearingtracker.com/t/battery-life-of-your-hearing-aids/71365/31?u=delta10

That depends. These Phonak Nathos Auto SP ( Bolero V70 SP ) normally last a couple of hours after the first warning.
The previous Naida S V SP would at best only last perhaps 30 mins, sometimes beep then shut down a few minutes later.
I can not now recall about the Oticon Spirit Zest ( I think ) but would expect few are still using those as 10+ years ago when issued.

@talter said:

Wow, I’m impressed. My last HA’s were Starkey. I got four to five days. My new HA’s are Philips. Same thing, four to five days with very little streaming.

12 days is great. Mine is about 5 days as well, but I have hearing aids through government services.

I’m late with this report. My 2nd battery change came at day 13!. Not streaming much these days because I’m hearing so clearly that I am not usually needing it.
Dan

Update: I’m now on the last pair from a pack of 8 batteries I got with the aids. Doing the math, that works out to ~9 days and change per battery, which feels pretty accurate based on my experience. They are definitely lasting more than a week but not by a lot. It does seem to vary with the amount of streaming. Also, I don’t have any data to back this up but it would be interesting to know how much using the TV connector or roger direct affects it compared to “straight” bluetooth. Those use a different protocol to send audio which may be more efficient.

I’ve been wearing Signia Silk 1X for the last year and battery life was typically about 4 to 5 days while wearing them 8 to 10 hours/day. Recently however the battery life has dropped significantly to less than one day. Not sure what the problem is. I boosted the gain a little, and I wonder if that affects battery life. I’m also getting to the bottom of my battery supply that I bought about a year ago, but the battery packaging says they are good til 2025.

@daalias said:

Not sure what the problem is. I boosted the gain a little, and I wonder if that affects battery life

Yes this will, but only a very small amount, certainly not 4-5 days to just 1 day, definitely something else going on, is this both HAs, as in do both run out at the same time?
Also is this a size 10 or 312 battery, could be time to try another batch of batteries just to be sure.

nice. I never thought about it before.

Well, this has gotten interesting. And not in a good way…

The left aid died last night. Up til now I’ve been using the pack of Rayovac size 13 batteries the audiologist gave me with the hearing aids and not had any issues. All of the info I’ve shared on performance is from using that one pack. That pack is now used up so I had to move to what I typically have on hand, also Rayovac but different packaging that I got a year ago (I buy in bulk, box of 60 for $20). The aid turned on but immediately died with the new battery. Thinking I must have mixed the replacement up with the dead one (unlikely but possible), I take it out and dispose of it, then put in the “other” battery. Aid seems to work fine so I chalk it up to a mistake on my part, oops.

Next day the same aid dies again. I put in another battery from the same pack but the same thing happens. I put that same battery into my old aids and it works fine, so the battery is not actually dead. Cue lots of swapping of batteries between different aids and this is what I’ve observed:

• Letting the battery “breathe” for a minute after taking the tab off helps, at least with these batteries. I’ve never followed that instruction before and never had a reason to.
• I got these batteries a year ago so they are “old”, but their expiration isn’t until 2025 so they’re not old by the manufacturer’s definition.
• Putting a “defective” battery in the right-side aid worked fine for the brief time that I tried it, so this may be specific to the left side aid. I cleaned the battery compartment with a brush in case there was debris interfering with the connection, but that didn’t seem to make a difference.
• These bluetooth aids seem to push these zinc-air batteries to the limit of their capabilities so the brand and age of battery may matter a lot.

This is all unfortunate because up til now I’d gotten the impression that this sort of thing wasn’t going to be an issue as I’d feared it might be.

Update: So there is definitely an issue with the left side aid. A battery that “doesn’t work” on that side works fine in the right. Furthermore, the hearing doesn’t actually power off completely; the sound will drop out and it won’t connect to the app, but I don’t hear the disconnect chime in the other aid until I open the battery door.

@libc said:

Letting the battery “breathe” for a minute after taking the tab off helps, at least with these batteries. I’ve never followed that instruction before and never had a reason to.

Same, I’ve never bothered in the 20 or so years I’ve been using them, so a moot point.

@libc said:

I got these batteries a year ago so they are “old”, but their expiration isn’t until 2025 so they’re not old by the manufacturer’s definition.

Don’t always go by this, the battery is only as good as the sticker on the back, microscopic pockets of air getting in and you’ll have an issue or two (this is what some would call a bad batch)

@libc said:

Putting a “defective” battery in the right-side aid worked fine for the brief time that I tried it, so this may be specific to the left side aid.

Yeah possibly, but one thing to know is, a lot of the time across a range of brands, when you get the “chime” and even when it “dies” you can open the battery door and get a bit more time out of them, which you seem to have noticed here.
The battery monitor isn’t that accurate.

@libc said:

These bluetooth aids seem to push these zinc-air batteries to the limit of their capabilities so the brand and age of battery may matter a lot.

Sure with Bluetooth classic (Phonak) it does, but for ASHA and MFi are low energy (LE) so you can get a bit more juice from them.

Edit: I just read your update, take them in for service/repair, if it were me, I’d place them is a dryer over night and then factory reset/set to initial settings in the software, which could solve the problem.

Well, to update to my update…the right-side aid is doing the same thing, just not to the degree as the left. I don’t want to draw any firm conclusions until I’ve tested with a verified new pack of batteries.

They go in a drier every night. No Noahlink to do my own reset/reprogramming.

I think we can rule out streaming and Bluetooth then. It is also unlikely that both devices consume more power at the same time due to a defect.
Another possibility: speaking in loud noise needs a lot of power (Stereo Zoom).
Very heavy communication between the two aids is needed to build a directional micro.
Have you by chance been in large gatherings or restaurants in the last few days?
Or have you activated the program manually?
Your HAP could see this in Target’s usage statistics.