I’m demoing a set of Phonak Marvels with replaceable batteries. I stream audio to them a lot. At least a couple of hours of TV at night, plus podcasts during the day. I am burning through batteries. My plan was to get a set of hearing aids with rechargeable batteries, but I’m starting to think I’ll run out of juice before the end of the day with rechargeables. Should I just stick with replaceables?
Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Rechargeable life is weak. Not enough for 24hours. When manufacturers said 1 day… they thinking of wearing time, that is 8 hour a day. This is weak very weak. Noadays you stay at the zn-air and wait for the time when the rechargeables’ running time is equal with zn-air batteries but at least 7 days with 6 hours transmitting on bt, every day.
I have friends with the Phonak Marvel rechargeable and they get easily 16 hours out of a charge. And most of them do stream some.
Is it a Marvel with a 312 or a 13 battery? A 13 is twice the size of a 312. You would get more life out of a 13.
Still, if I were burning through batteries I would stick with the replaceable and not the rechargeable.
The batteries are the 13.
I’ve seen 16 hours cited, but that’s what concerns me. I put the aids in at 7 AM. I take them out at 10 or 11 PM. That’s 16 hours, so fine. BUT, I tend to stream from my iPad for about 4 hours a night and then an additional hour or two of podcasts during the day. I’m concerned the rechargeable won’t last 16 hours if 6 of those hours are streaming.
I fully understand that. I am retired now so my aids are in from the time I get up to when I go to bed too. Which is about 15 -17 hours. I do stream about 2 -3 hours.
True that you won’t (may not) get a full 24 hours out of Marvel rechargeable if you stream most of that time. I once took a long trip, 3 international flights 4 airports buses & taxis, and spent most of the time watching movies and listening to music. My aids went dead after about 24-26 hours. However, I did learn from that experience and that will probably not happen again. A 15 minute quick charge will give you another few hours, a 2 hour charge will give you another 24-26 hours.
Most of my days are pretty normal 16 hours days with some streaming and phone calls. Usually have about 50% charge left at the end of the day.
What he said right there. I don’t stream that much, I use the BT function of my M90 primarily for phone conversations. However, I missed charging them my third night owning them (charger was unplugged), and they were at about 10% when I put them in that morning. I put them back in the charger a couple hours later, and after 30 minutes they took me through the rest of the day with no problem.
If you get them, you might want to look at a second charging case.
Thank you, Psych1, this is actually the kind of experience I was hoping to hear about.
I trialed with the M90 rechargeables but purchased the M90 13. I founded that the rechargeable would last longer than I did and still had lots of battery life in them. I don’t think that they would run out of juice if you recharged them every night. I like my M90 13 and the battery life is about 80 hours of use and I am using expired batteries. I have fresher batteries and I have used them and they lasted over a 100 hours. I found that the batteries are not expensive and easily changed. This site offers a great deal on batteries. I think that rechargeable vs replaceable is a matter of what floats your boat!
I’ve been wearing M90-13T HAs since last September. The size 13 batteries will last me about 8 days if I do next to no streaming, and 5½ days if I do a lot of streaming. The MyPhonak app claims I wear them about 14 hours a day. Over the 126 days that I’ve been wearing these HAs, I’ve gone through 21 pairs of batteries. That works out nicely to 6 days/pair of batteries. [I love easy math 
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For me, a lot of streaming would be around 2–3 hours streaming TV from a Roger Select, and another 2–3 hours streaming music while I’m walking the dog or cleaning up at night. The smaller, size 312 batteries have about 60% of the capacity of the size 13s, so one would likely get 3½–5 days between changes with them.
I buy a bunch of batteries on line about once a year, and pay about $0.50 per pair. The cost differential for lots of streaming versus having a streaming fast is about $0.25/ week.
The reason I went with batteries is I worried I might find myself on travel at some time and not able to get to a charger reliably. With batteries, one has no worries, provided one carries a few spares around.
I have Phonak Marvel 70 rechargeable. I get 16 hours a day without a problem. 6am-11:30. Streaming cuts down the time. When I hear the Train whistle warning I take a break, put the aids in the charger. 20-30 minutes later I continue to stream before going to bed. Not a problem. Rechargeable is a great feature.
I find that I can have up to a half a day’s worth of battery life after I get the warning that the battery is low. I think that if I have a few days on the battery and if I have loud noises that draws on the battery, I will get the warning. When the noises goes away the battery rebounds and will last a few more hours giving me time to change the battery.
I get 4 or 5 days out of my marvel batteries but I only wear them 15 hour each day. no streaming of music. Used only for hearing and television. they are size 13 batteries. If I streamed music that would all I would hear. If battery goes dead you can immediately replace them. You cannot do that if you have to recharge when dead.
I get about 8 hours streaming total out of them before the need to charge. 16~18 hours with a few streaming calls in between.
Recently, on a priority 1(system down) call that lasted 10 hours, I had to switch to my headphones at 8 hours and drop the marvels in the charger for an hour (fully charged in 1 hour).
You have pretty bad hearing loss. Talking about battery life, what receivers do you have on your aids? Do you use Sound Recover2?
After 15 hours use with a couple hours streaming my Audeo RT aids are yellow when placed on the charger. These are my first rechargeable aids. My routine of placing the aids in the dryer each night is messed up. Still trying to figure out how to deal with this.
I have custom cshell molds with normal receivers (not the power ones). This is my first year with HAs, and I should probably have the power receivers but my brain could not hack it; it was overwhelming and I couldn’t stand it.
I am in a better place now, brain acceptance wise, but the cshell molds are perfect, so I do not want to change LOL.
I do not use Sound Recover2, but I should revisit it. It sounded “weird” to me in the beginning (as did everything) so I turned it off. My guess is I would really like it, if I could hack dealing with the weirdness for a month while my brain adjusted.
If you use Sound Recover the aids should use less gain/battery. At least it’s that way with me.
I am deaf in the upper frequencies so I use sound recover aggressively to lower these high frequencies down into my hearing zones. This enables the use of less powerful hearing aids with profound hearing losses with typical ski slope loss.
How do you stream TV audio, Bluetooth pairing or via a Phonak TV Connector. The former is battery hungry by far. BTW, if you are already burning batteries you may want to stay with size 13.