@Luga: I power my HA charger with a battery pack, both of which live in my nightstand drawer. This getup solves the dual bugaboos of:
- Dangling cords for cats to play with/chew through, and
- Frequent, unannounced power failures in our neck of the boonies.
I usually put my HAs in around 05:00-05:30h, and take them out between 23:00-23:30 h. Usually, I still have between 18-25% power left in my rechargeable batteries at the end of the day. I drop the aids into the charger, hit the power button on the battery pack, and they’re all charged up and ready to go ~2 1;2 hours later… except for one night when I guess I didn’t hit the button correctly, and didn’t check the charging status of the recharging station/aids. Bummer.
When I awakened at about 03:30h for my run to the loo, I did remember to check my drawer: no charging lights were visible! Double bummer. I took the aids out and powered them up. The left aid showed 0% on the ON app meter, while the right aid indicated a residual charge of ~8%. I was relieved when I returned the HAs to their cradle, powered up the battery pack, and saw both devices light up as they’re supposed to when charging. Pew.
That morning, I slept in until about 08:00h, which is not my habit. The right aid showed green (charged), but the left was still yellow (not unexpected, since this device had shown less remaining charge at 03:30h.). Yet, when I pulled the left aid out of the charger and waited for it to boot up, it showed 100% charged on the app meter. This, recall, is the device whose LED was yellow when I removed it from the charger. I replaced it into the charger, and its LED charge status light turned green, immediately.
Thus began several days of increasingly erratic battery behaviour, ending in a botched battery exchange in the audiologist’s office and having to return the aids and charger to Oticon for examination.
As it happens, there were 2 mistakes made when the batteries were swapped out by the audiologist’s front desk personnel:
- OpnS batteries were installed into my More1 devices, rather than the appropriate cells, and
- The zero of the internal charge meter in the hearing aids was not recalibrated, as is required when installing new batteries (further exacerbating the crazy readings I was getting from the incorrect batteries).
So - I think that those of us who had no choice but to take delivery of rechargeable HAs have reason to be apprehensive about the unknown glitches we may encounter a year or two down the line. I no longer think that I’m a hypochondriac when my charge values aren’t what I think they should be at the end of the day.
[I apologize for the long post - if it is deemed to be too off-topic for inclusion in this thread, I will gladly copy and paste it into a new topic heading. I included the narrative here because I thought it would be useful to Luga.]