Battery monitoring is a very complex art.
Also batteries are simply gobs of goo, so they all work differently.
You can have from zero seconds warning to maybe an hour … but NOTHING is predictable.
Hmmm…So you’re saying it’s a function of the battery, not the hearing aids?
I am with English…
I have found that they all seem to fade away differently.
Power One work well right up to the time they go dead.
Some seem to fade away over days.
Some brands seem to start a fade - echo phase.
I get 2 weeks out of most, however, I am not disciplined enough to just change them on a schedule.
This can all vary significantly depending how long I have them in or if I take them out for some reason…which happens.
I just bought about 20 packs from Local Battery and keep a pack in my desk, car, home…where ever so I am never very far from replacements.
I just don’t worry about it.
Love it English, gobs of goo!
BR (Before Rechargeable) my batteries were not all that predictable and when I was trialing the Rexton Insite CIC, it would give me the signal and then when it died, if I left it in my ear long enough without changing the battery, the dead battery would recover a little bit of power and the aid would come back on for a few seconds and die again.
The rechargeable (Rexton) batteries last longer than I can stay awake.
Those rechargeables are PowerOne ACCU batteries, same as came with my GN ReSound Pulse aids. My mom just got a pair of Rexton’s from Costco, and I was looking at them this weekend and verified that.
I have have the Rexton Cobalt 12+ HAs. I get less than an hour warning. If I’m at a noisy area at school, the beeps are so soft I don’t hear them. In addition, since the aids communicate with each other, when one dies due to the battery, both of them turn off. I can turn the one that has a good battery back on by opening the battery compartment and then closing it.
The last time that happened I was doing the “huh, what” routine until I figured out my aids were nothing more than ear plugs.
Jeff
LOL! That happened to me last night! My wife asked me something and I’m “what was that?” and “Huh?” She says, do you have your HA’s in? I had them on and tried changing program and realized, “Oh, the batteries are dead!”
Those were my first set of batteries (312’s), lasted 9 days. I’m now on the rechargeable’s that came with the aids. Will see how they last, and beep. I found I did not hear the beep when the other batteries died.
when one dies due to the battery, both of them turn off
Mine just started doing that. “Your aids communicate with each other”, explained my audiologist. I’ve had these things for almost a year and this just started. And yes, when they both go off, it’s like having ear plugs.
My experience is that the time it takes for the batteries to go dead after the warning tone varies greatly. I have been using Power One batteries exclusively since I got my HA’s, which are Phonak NIOS.
So I have no experience with other brands, but the Power One cells vary from dying almost instantly after the tone, to lasting a couple of hours, with the tone going off every 30 min or so. Rarely do they last more than that. Obviously, if your aid is working hard when the tone sounds, then you’ll have less time before the battery dies completely.
I always carry a spare pair of cells in my pocket, protected by a battery caddie so my keys don’t short the cells out or rip the tabs off.
I’ve been keeping my spare batteries in my coin purse. A couple of times, the batteries haven’t worked. I just thought they were bad batteries, but maybe the coins are causing them to short-out.
You can get a battery caddy or battery caddy with battery tester here: http://www.adcohearing.com/haa_batt_acc.html
This is my experience also…
Could be either/both.
Not all voltage sensors in hearing aids will be 100% identical.
Zinc-air batteries will maintain most of their voltage throughout their service life unlike some battery types that gradually lose their voltage as they get depleted. This means that once you hear the battery warning, you should expect the cell to soon die. 15 minutes is pretty good, I think. My guess is that the less juice the hearing aid uses, the longer time you’ll have. Most circuits have some variability in the amount of circuit drain so you shouldn’t be surprised it you have differing warning times between the same aids.
Some folks like to keep track of when they change their batteries by sticking the cell tabs on a calendar on the day they change. I wouldn’t do it myself but some folks do. Good luck!
As soon as I hear the first battery warning beeps, I start hunting up a new set of batteries.
I keep a fresh set batteries in my wallet, a pack on my cork board in my office at work, at pack in my truck, a set in the tool box on both of my race bikes (bicycles Trek 1500SLR & Trek SC7) and another set in the carrying case that I store the hearing aids in at night.
Batteries for me are like beer, at the first indication of limited supply, I start making a replenishment plan. Nothing worse than a dead battery or an empty refrigerator, with no backup supplies.
I mean, a guys got to live…right? :eek:
‘Gobs of goo’: from your thesus?
I like that.
The Oticon Agil Pros I demoed last summer gave about 12 hours warning. On the Resound Aleras I bought and have had more experience with, I typically get one hour warning, though it has ranged from 15 minutes to 2 hours. I’m not sure which is better. It’s annoying to have the warning going off in the ear for a day, and it makes me reluctant to change the batteries at first opportunity when I know they’re probably still good for the rest for the day, but then, at least there’s a better chance to locate replacement batteries. Sometimes, an hour isn’t enough notice.
12 hours of warning is pretty excessive not as useful as an aid that gives an hour or 15 minutes warning. I don’t know what triggers the warning beeps on these things although a lot of them will give out the average life of the battery on the on-board logging. I don’t now how they do that either.
My guess is that it’s a problem with the software and that future versions will correct this - or not. They may even fix the problem for your aids, if the software is upgradeable.
The weird thing about hearing aids is we’re obviously moving into aids being software driven devices and it’s not going to matter much who makes the device because the reality is that the only real difference is going to be the software. Hearing aids are going to be as generic as PCs.
Yes, and it may vary somewhat by battery brand as well.
My guess is that it simply reads the battery voltage recovery time after the initial high drain start-up. Perhaps the voltage dropping below a certain threshold will trigger it.
You’re probably right about the battery brand being a factor but it could be the batteries are a commodity item and it’s tough to track down the actual manufacturer or it may vary over time.
My feeling at the moment is that we should be buying batteries solely on price. I have had some problems with a German-made battery ballooning up and getting stuck in the aids but that seems to be fixed - thank God. 