Skip to content
HearingTracker
Log in

Phonak Lumity L 312 Battery: Right drains faster than left. Who knew?

This topic is closed.

16 replies2.8k viewsLast reply

Link to this topic

I just noticed, and remarked to my Fitter, that my right battery drains faster than my left. This has been the case with all of my Phonaks over the last several years. She told me that the right Phonak hearing aid is the active partner, if you will. It receives all the information first, then passes the puck to the left hearing aid. Because the right ha does most of the initial work, it runs down faster. Well, there you are!

11 people in this conversation5 min readJump to latest

You’re right.
I understand that the Right or Left can be set up as lead in Target.

My dispensing audi didn’t bother to turn this feature on. It must be part of the setup in the Phonak Audeo Paradise P90R’s in Target.

I learned that it’s an essential feature in setup.

Yes…there is one hearing aid that is set as the “master” hearing aid to broker the bluetooth signals (default is right hearing aid). It wears down faster if you have bluetooth devices connected.

Here is a work around that I have discovered after playing around with this. Wouldn’t mind if someone else could verify this…

After noticing one night that the Master hearing aid was getting kinda low compared to the other hearing aid, I decided to pop just the Master hearing aid into the charger to top it back up. I kept the other hearing aid in my ear so that I could still hear a bit. As soon as the Master started charging, I got the three descending tones in the other hearing aids indicating that it had lost connection with the Master hearing aid. After 30 minutes in the charger, I put the Master hearing aid back in my ear and immediately got the reconnection tone in the other ear.

Here is the interesting thing. An hour later I checked my battery levels again in the myPhonak App and it now appeared that the other hearing aid was using more power (not the Master that I just charged). I think that the role of Master hearing aid had flipped to the other hearing aid when the Master turned off to charge but I need other people to verify this. If this is the case, it provides an undocumented way to flip the Master hearing aid to the other ear to preserve battery life. Same should be true for the 312 version. I’m just not sure it is really doing this and I need other to verify.

Jordan

@JordanK

I’ve had my right hearing aid go dead a couple of times. Paradise P90R’s. Needed to be rebooted and recharged.

Rant…(I was at work. APP showed 0 charge in the right , normal in the left HA; it had been fully charged when I took the HA’s out of the charger about 2 hours before.

Went home at lunch. Charged both. Rebooted the right one IIRC. (had printed off the manual.) After more than an hour I had two working hearing aids.

This all happened when I was still a client of the dispensing audiologist. When I went to someone knew they found that the hearing aids weren’t connected to each other and wrong domes were specified. The dispensing audi had erased my hearing aids and did a quick-fit with Target when I left. We parted friends I thought. Point is that I don’t know if they were ever set up with L connected to R.)

@lace_n said:

She told me that the right Phonak hearing aid is the active partner

I was told the same, BUT… my left side is a bit worse than the right, so it uses more power, and it cuts out a bit before the right one, all depends on the requirements that you have, nothing to panic about, the important thing is that I can hear.

Your audiologist can set either the right or left ear to be the hearing aid that handles the bluetooth connection. I actually have the left hearing set as the Master hearing aid.

Jordan

The master hearing aid draws more power from the battery, especially during streaming. Which is the master is an option in Target, the programming software for your Phonak aid. The master side defaults to the right side. If your right side hearing is weaker than the left, then moving the master side to the left would balance the load.

If your provider has a battery current drain meter, you could know for sure if one is higher drain. Unfortunately I don’t think many newer providers have such a tool. I thought it was invaluable for troubleshooting hearing aids. Today most “professional’s” don’t know how to trouble shoot and just send the aids back to the lab. It would be worth asking about the drain meter.

I asked my to switch my master aid to the left ear due to the aforementioned higher battery drain.

The problem is the left aid drains far more than the right because my left aid is a medium receiver due to a higher loss than my right aid’s standard size receiver…be careful if your receivers are not the same power. The master aid battery drain delta is now far greater in the left versus the right aid due to the difference in the receiver sizes.

Now I need to have the master returned to the right side…DAHH

With mine, both aids and receivers are the same, so no issue with changing from Right to Left.

I did this change because my Right battery was older (holding less charge) so it was logical to have the Left (newer battery) doing extra work as ‘master’ - mainly handling the BlueTooth connection.

After the change, I could confirm the *battery use was more even between the two so it was useful to make this change with my HAs.

  • with rechargeable aids (as mine are} you can monitor battery use in the app, but not with disposable batteries.

@Michael_Phonak

Thanks for participating here. I’ve had ’s for 20 years. 1 Widex; 3 pairs of Phonaks (wsib compensation due to loud noise at work).
You make a difference for me because you respond to posts.
I’m in Toronto, 2 miles from the Sonova office.
DaveL

In reply to @Michael_Phonak

Your right Michael_Phonak. I was not thinking about rechargeable aids. I just got a pair of Lumity 90 but with the removable battery, I guess that was on my mind. I have never been a fan of rechargeable aid (going back to the late 1970’s)
so waited until the removable battery was an option on the Lumity.

Here my experience is that they talk to audiologists and hearing instrument specialists; not to users. I’ve tried and they referred me to them. I’ve sat while my dispensing audiologist talked on speaker phone as a silent person at his request.

For instance I’ve informed him there were updates for my hearing aids and Phonak/Sonova confirmed to him while I listened. He didn’t know prior to my visit.

You are a breath of fresh air.

Related discussions