Philips charger system error?

[J-I]

I’ve just started using my new Philips 9040 hearing aids purchased from Costco. I fully charged the included “Charger Plus” (the travel charger with the built-in battery), and everything has been working fine. However, I now for the first time need to recharge the built-in battery of the charger, and when I plugged the charger into a USB power source, the three orange lights on the back of the charger started flashing, which means “system error.”

The manual just says I need to “contact my hearing aid professional.” I’ll do this tomorrow, of course, but I’d like if possible to avoid a 90 minute bike ride to Costco. Does anyone here know what the system error might be, and if there’s a way to reset the charger?

The AC power plug that comes with the charger puts out 1000 mA, and the instruction manual says it’s ok to use other USB power sources so long as they output “a minimum of 500 mA.” When I just tried to recharge the charger, I used a USB power source that outputs 1500 mA. That’s still a pretty low output for a USB power source, but is it possible it somehow damaged the charger?

Thanks for any help!

[firenzel]

Have you already tried another USB AC-Charger and another USB cable?

[J-I]

Yes. The problem is that the charger is now seemingly stuck in error mode. The three orange lights on the back are continuing to blink.

[Volusiano]

Did you try to do both, either have the hearing aids in the charger, then not in the charger, when you tried it? You get the 3 red flashing LEDs either way? Just grasping at straws here for anything…

[Don]

Here is my non-professional description of chargers. The charger needs to have a capacity that is at least as high as what the item being charged will draw. So, if charger has 1500ma capacity, and item being charged only draws 500ma, all is good. If the charger has 500ma capacity, and item draws 1500ma, the item will probably overheat the charger.

[cvkemp]

Have you tried recharging the charger without the aids in it. The error could be trying to charge both the charger and the aids at the same time. I have the Oticon smart chargers for both the Real and More aids as well as the INTENT aids. I make sure the charger has the needed charge to charge the aids or I recharge the charger first.

[dankailo]

Try using a different USB wire (if you have one) - faulty USB wire could cause the problem.

[J-I]

Thank you everyone for all the helpful replies. I should have clarified in my original post that the system error occurred immediately after I plugged the charger into the power supply (a USB charging socket on a desk lamp), and it made no difference whether or not the hearing aids were in the charger. Trying a different power source didn’t make any difference, nor did changing the USB cable.

The problem now seems to have resolved itself. After I unplugged the charger, it continued flashing the error message (three blinking orange LEDs) for several hours. The charger was also slightly warm, which is not normal. Then, hours later, I noticed that the blinking lights had gone out, I assume because there was no residual power left in the charger. I plugged it back into the AC power supply that came with the charger. A single orange LED started blinking, indicating extremely low power (too little power in the charger to charge the hearing aids). I left it on charge, and after about 5 hours it indicated full charge (3 green LEDs). I unpluged the charger, inserted my hearing aids, and successfully charged them overnight.

So everything now seems fine. I can only conclude that there was something funky about the USB power outlet in my desk light, which I hadn’t used before. I’ll stay away from it in the future.

[Volusiano]

@J-I

So everything now seems fine. I can only conclude that there was something funky about the USB power outlet in my desk light, which I hadn’t used before. I’ll stay away from it in the future.

This is not necessarily the case. If you can use the desk light USB outlet successfully now, after the charger has appeared to work properly now, then this will prove that it’s not the desk light USB outlet.

My guess as to what happened is that the charger was far too deeply discharged that the battery voltage was below the safety threshold level where the system is allowed to recharge it. So when you tried to plug it in, nothing happened except for the red flashing system error lights.

Hours later after you left it alone, luckily the battery was not completely dead for good, so it was allowed enough time to do some self-recovery, and was able to recover and push its voltage output back to be above the safety threshold level where the system would be allowed to charge it again.

You can find plenty of YouTube videos that show you tricks on how to apply a direct voltage to a dead lithium ion battery (like a Ryobi tool battery, for example) that would otherwise seem to not be able to be charged up anymore, so that it would get “revived” with the external voltage “jolt” to feed it enough current to bring it back from the dead. Not a full recharge by any mean, just enough to “wake” it up to hold some bare minimum voltage for the charger to recognize that this is not a completed dead battery, but only a fully discharged battery. Then the charger is now allowed to charge the battery once it sees a minimum rechargeable voltage on the battery.

Of course in your case, there’s no access anywhere to apply this trick. The only thing you can do is to leave it alone for a few hours or a day or two and hope that it can recover by itself. Many rechargeable batteries, when fully discharged, as long as they’re not dead completely, might be able to self-recover with time to allow the chemical process to happen inside the battery to rebalance itself back to a small positive charge. As long as this small positive charge is above the safety threshold level, the charger will be allowed to charge it again at that time.

The moral of the story is that don’t keep using the smart charger for more cycles then the spec says it is designed to provide. If you do so, you may run the risk of discharging the battery too deep and next time, you may not be lucky enough to see it recover itself.

[J-I]

You may be right. I know that lithium batteries do not like to be fully discharged. However, most contemporary electronics have circuitry to make sure that they shut off before the battery is discharged beyond the point that problems can occur. I’d be very surprised if the Philips charger didn’t include such circuitry, but who knows?

As a test, I’ll try using the desk lamp usb outlet again when the Philips charger is only partially discharged. Fingers crossed that it will work and that I don’t end up permanently destroying the charger

[Volusiano]

@J-I

You may be right. I know that lithium batteries do not like to be fully discharged. However, most contemporary electronics have circuitry to make sure that they shut off before the battery is discharged beyond the point that problems can occur. I’d be very surprised if the Philips charger didn’t include such circuitry, but who knows?

We should hope so (about the bold part above), but we simply don’t know what kind of assumptions that the mfg makes about the battery use pattern by the user that may not hold true, and they design their fail safe mechanism around these assumptions that might have been written down as instruction that the user might ignore.

I’m curious on how many charge cycles you were able to run the hearing through this charger before the low battery indicator light started flashing? And what is the minimum amount of charge cycles the manual says it can do?

I’m asking this because I know of somebody who received an Oticon smart charger from the VA for their Intent, and they’ve been able to put the Intents through 11 charge cycles before they see a low battery indicator. I don’t really know how many charge cycles the Intent smart charger is designed to handle, but their Real and More smart charger is spec’ed out in their manual to be able to hold a minimum 3 charge cycles. It seems a stretch that the Intent smart charger manual (when available) will say that the minimum number of charge cycles would be 10 or something like that, though.

[J-I]

Here’s an update on the charger “system error” issue. I had had the same thought as Volusiano - that the “system error” might have resulted from the charger being overly discharged, rather than from a flawed power source. To test this, yesterday my Philips “charger plus” was only 1/3 discharged - it was showing two (out of 3) green lights. I then plugged the empty charger (my hearing aids were not inside it) into the questionable desk lamp USB power source. I instantaneously got the system error code (3 blinking orange lights).

I tried plugging it into the AC wall socket, and as previously happened the error code continued to flash. I tried putting my hearing aids into the charger, and the error code continued to flash. I let the unplugged empty charger sit for 14 hours, and the error code continued to flash. At this point I was in a quandary. I now need to recharge my hearing aids, plus if my previous experience was a guide I would need to wait until the charger completely discharged to resolve the problem, which (since the charger started off 2/3 full) might take a very long time. So I took a gamble and left put my hearing aids in the charger overnight. This morning, the error code had stopped flashing, and my hearing aids were completely charged. I plugged the charger into the AC wall outlet, and a single orange light started flashing, indicating that the charger was in fact completely discharged. Over the past several hours it seems to be recharging normally (now showing 3 non-blinking orange lights when plugged in, and 3 green lights when unplugged, so it is nearly completely recharged).

So, the problem was clearly a defective power source. Thankfully, no damage seems to have been done to either the charger or the hearing aids. Whatever the issue is, it does seem to cause a greater than normal drain on the charger. It was 2/3 full before this second episode started, and then after sitting unused for 14 hours and then recharging my hearing aids overnight, it was completely discharged whereas normally it should at that point have been half or at most 2/3 discharged.

Last, to answer Volusiano’s question, I normally get about 6 hearing aid recharges with the fully-charged charger. Note that my hearing aids are usually have around 30-40 percent remaining charge at the end of the day when I put them in the charger, so the 6 “recharges” that I’m getting represent 6 days of use, but are not 6 complete recharges.

[J-I]

Here’s another update. I talked with someone on Philips’ customer service “escalation team,” who said the maximum output of a USB power source used to charge the “charger plus” should be 1 amp. I was surprised to hear this, since 1 amp is pretty low for a USB power source (I suspect most car USB outlets are considerably higher-powered). And there is nothing in the charger manual about maximum allowable amperage for the power source, just the warning that the minimum amperage for the power source is 0.5 amps.

However, since the output of the USB power source on my desklamp is 1.5 amps, it was just possible that this was the cause of the system error I received when I used the desklamp to charge the charger. So as a test, I tried using the Sony-branded USB power source that came with a Sony camera I own, and which puts out 1.5 amp. It worked perfectly with the Philips charger. So again, this strongly indicates that the desklamp has a defective USB power outlet, and the Philips charger in fact works fine with a 1.5 amp power source.