Traditional battery vs. rechargeable

That’s why I never buy a rechargeable hearing aid. I’d wait till a future generation of chargeable hearing aids that would last a at least a week with one charge

It;s no more problem for HAs than it is for a phone. If a power failure is in your future, just make sure you have a phone charger you can plug into your car. If flooding is common and a functioning car might be hard to come by, have a power bank charged and ready as a standby, which you should have for your phone anyway.

@jazzpete said:

I can definitely say that I’m so glad I have trad batteries having been through hurricane Ian and no power for 9 days. I’d have a great deal of difficulty communicating without my hearing aids.

YOU SAID IT!!! Glad you survived and had the “ears” needed for this biblical event. This is a point worth chiseling in stone. And I’m a happy camper wearing rechargeable Phonak Lumity Life aids as I say it!

I’m EVER so glad I have backup aids - Phonak Marvels - with batteries. As it is, in a normal day, I have to switch to the Marvels after 13 hrs of rechargeables. Your experience tells me that in an emergency I should have the Marvels ON, batteries IN HAND and if there’s room in the evacuation kit, grab the newer Life aids. When and IF Phonak comes out with a Lumity Life battery option, I’ll go for it.

It seems that manufacturers are increasingly switching to rechargeables across the board. It’s another classic example of “Don’t Walk the Walk, so Can’t Talk the Talk!” as they have no idea of our needs. We don’t wear hearing aids for ear candy. We wear them to hear for safety and our own good health. So manufacturers should be ever aware that hearing aid users have different needs than those on the assembly line just cranking them out.

@cvkemp said:

I have two sets of aids that fit my hearing needs, just in case of repairs.

That is my story to a “T”. Absolutely need backups .. and I’m so paranoid about being without ears that I have kept EVERY SINGLE PAIR of aids from the 1990s to today. I even dug out an old pair of AGX ITE aids to wear during the pandemic when hubs would cut 'n color my hair. I didn’t want him snipping through my ear wires or dyeing my BTE unit chocolate brown.

@jeffrey said:

rechargeable aids are very convenient and I love not having to remember to shop for batteries all the time.

I’m in that camp, too, LOL! But the irony for me is that almost every single day I have to swap to my battery-operated Marvel aids. I honestly don’t know why I’m only getting 13 hrs out of my Lumity Life aids. I don’t stream more than 2 hrs of TV at night. I thought I was done buying HA batteries? But indeed, I have to mark my calendar and swap in a new set of batts in my Marvels on Day 6 every single week so I’m never caught with them dead when I make the nightly switch.

Sigh.

@cvkemp said:

I am asking for the Oticon OWN1 aids as my main aids so the More1 aids will be my backups and my OPNS1 for a backup to the backup.

Have you ever seen The Marx Bros movie “A Night at the Opera”? Cuz your backups for the backup pair of backups sounds a LOT like the dialogue between Groucho and Chico about The Contract - and what part of it isn’t needed!

One can never have enough backups is what I’m thinking.

Let me start off by saying I’m very new to the world of HAs. Please take what I say here with that consideration.

But I’m also a retired product development engineer with substantial experience in electronics packaging. It seems to me this is a problem we don’t need to have.

My understanding is that some are plenty satisfied with their rechargeable aids. Those who are not are typically those with more profound loss, so the aids have to work harder. So they don’t last long enough.

I think there’s also a bit of ‘don’t want to change, things were fine as the were’ attitude here. Claims that backups are necessary seem a little weak when no one is complaining about not being able to use replaceable batteries in their phone.

So my question is, would rechargeables be acceptable if they gave twice the run time they do now?

Background: Up until a few months ago I had never even thought about hearing aids much at all. I had seen them. My closest encounter was a colleague with profound loss years ago. He wore two aids, they were about 2/3 the length of his ear, looked clunky, but I figured he needed them. So no big deal.

Fast forward to just recently when I started looking into them for me, and I’m astounded at how small the BTE models are. I mean, really tiny. So, small is good, it’s very techie, but do they NEED to be that small? Seems like people got along just fine with the bigger ones. Would it be acceptable if your BTE aids were maybe 10 mm longer? You know, like the diameter of another battery?

There should be no reason at all that you couldn’t put two batteries in these things. Wire them in parallel and all the electronics work just as before. Even the charger wouldn’t have to change, if there’s enough headroom for the taller aids. You could even have standard and long duration versions of the same models. You could try out the standard, and if it wasn’t enough down the road it would be easy to re-case them with the added battery. The electrical portion of that change is no more than two solder joints.

The only difference is they take twice as long to charge from full dead. And they have a longer life because they aren’t as deeply discharged if you still charge them every day.

For all the complaints I’ve seen here, why is this not already a thing?

I can piggyback a backup battery to my iPhone that uses the MagSafe connection and continue to using my phone I can’t do that for my aids. Yes my aids are rechargeable but as needed I can power down one set and power up my backup aids.

Hey, I don’t know what to debate about Traditional vs Rechargeable.

But I can definitely tell this.

Traditional battery probably never die. They will always available sooner or later.

To hear Dr Cliff and a few other audiologist, they are pushing the rechargeable aids as hard as they can. I really don’t understand it. Disposable and rechargeable have their uses and both should remain available.

@ctromley said:

I think there’s also a bit of “don’t want to change, things were fine as they were” attitude here.

Well, they are fine, for me at least. Why would I want to switch away from a battery technology that, besides being time-proven, is the one with the highest power density, appropriately enough for this application? Preemptive answers to some reasons you might cite:

I consider <4 ounces of non-toxic batteries per year a negligible addition to my existing contribution to landfills. Double that for packaging? Offset that by the fact that, after the lifespan of a pair of rechargeable aids, I’ll have two chargers to dispose of, including one spare.

I consider $25/year for batteries to be a negligible expense.

(Preceding two paragraphs based on size 13 batteries changed once a week)

I’ve learned to work around disposable batteries’ lack of a meaningful charge indicator, by changing them on a schedule that makes it unlikely I’ll run out in the middle of the day.

I’m fortunate to not have manual dexterity issues.