Truly will the lower temperatures effect hearing aid batteries? They are snuggled either behind or in your ears.
Hey there, 25Firefighter. It’s been a few months. What did you end up buying? I’m trying to make the same decision you were facing in November.
Well I trialed Rexton from Costco and the Hearing Aid Specialist was over aggressive trying to adjust them. I returned them and since went on Medicare. I am on a plan that pays for hearing aids in full. I visited an audiologist chose Octicon under her advisement. Waited three weeks . Called her and she told me my order was listed as pending. Called company handling the order and they said she never ordered them. I was wary of her because she seemed so unorganized. I did decide to try rechargeable. Now starting all over. thanks for asking will keep you informed.
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Wow, this does not sound like a fun experience. That is awesome you are getting them paid for though! I hope you find a good audiologist. Do you have aids to use in the mean time?
Yes got an old pair of resounds about 4 years old. Found/tried a new audiologist. Same old voice recognition, beeps masking test. This one loves resounds. He just certified with my company that provides the aids. He tried to upsell me up to 1700 each which includes amount insurance paid. Told him I just wanted what insurance paid for. Said he doesn’t have a list of hearing aids covered but thinks I could get Resound Quattros rechargeable no charge. We will see.
There are quite a few threads on the forum about rechargeable batteries vs. disposables. A lot of times the pro-disposable faction is dissing the rechargeable folks as “Li-ion just can’t be counted on to last.”
I’ve post a number of times on how one can make rechargeables last. But just this week I started researching buying an all electric vehicle and was indeed worried about how long such an expensive purchase would last. The news that I read was that, with care, one should be able to go the 8-years and 100,000 miles that ~all EV’s offer as a minimum in the U.S. The battery should still function very well up to that point. And with further care, the vehicle’s battery should last, probably with reduced performance and range, 15 to 20 years. And the best EV batteries are capable of heating and cooling themselves either from their own charge (if reasonably charged up) or from a wall outlet for extended parking. So no doubt, if one took the time to adequately care for one’s HA rechargeable batteries, they should at least last the 5 to 6 years or so the OEM’s claim for rechargeables. The main thing about car batteries that makes them last so long is the car OEM’s recommend keeping charge between 20% and 80% (don’t go to 0% and don’t go to 100%), don’t expose to high heat, and don’t rapidly charge (use sparingly). So HA OEM’s could build some of these features into HA’s to make rechargeable HA’s work even better. How to Make Your Lithium-Ion EV or Device Battery Last Longer and Electric Car Battery Life: Everything You Need to Know and How Long Do Electric Car Batteries Last? | CARFAX and How Long Should An Electric Car’s Battery Last?
The last reference says at 12,000 mi per year, you should be able to get 17 years use of your EV’s battery.
Hopefully, there will not be a whole bunch more forum posts on “you just can’t expect a Li-ion battery to last.” Rechargeable HA’s just need a better battery management system to make sure they last even half as long as an EV Li-ion battery - which is subject to a lot more stress than an HA battery, for sure.
Yes, electric cars/hybrids put some thought into making their batteries last both in the form of temperature control and how they’re charged (as you mentioned). In California, batteries have to last 10 years or 150,000 miles. On certain Teslas, (S and X) the standard (non California) warranty is 8 years or 150,000 miles. What are you thinking of getting? I think you’ve had some bad luck with an Accord Hybrid. My two Prius (Prii?) have been essentially trouble free. Toyota is supposed to be coming out with a couple of new Plugins in 2022.
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To stay somewhat on topic, I’d say that rechargeable HA’s ought to come with “extra” battery capacity so a BMS (Battery Management System) ought to be able to give you plenty of rechargeable hours while keeping you between 20% and 80% of capacity of the total battery capacity-and the HA OEMs ought to advertise if they’re helping rechargeable users out in that way. And just as for cars, there ought to be a really rapid charging mode as needed but the smartphone app ought to mind the number of fast rechargings you’ve done and encourage you to budget only so many per month.
After the Texas Deep Freeze where we were without power for 2.5 days, when I read about the full-house backup capability of the new Ford F-150 Lightning XLT (150 kWh battery), I decided to spring for that (I’ve always wanted a pickup for all the things I could never fit in a standard sedan to bring home or haul away from my house). But you really don’t get a 300 mile range out of it if you stick between 20% and 80% charge (60% of capacity is only 180 miles) and although you can recharge the 60% capacity in 41 minutes at a DC fast charger, Ford itself advises against doing that too much as it degrades long-term battery lifespan slowly (80% of EV owners recharge at home overnight). OTH, the vehicle weighs 3.25 tons but can do 0 to 60 in 4.4 seconds! (that degrades battery life, too!). 
And the “frunk” (empty space under hood where a big gasoline motor used to be) can hold 14 cu ft of stuff (up to 400 lbs), as much as the rear trunk in my Accord sedan. To come back on topic, the truck can also deliver 9.6 kW both in 120 V and 240 V AC from its many outlets so wherever I am with the truck, even out in the woods, I can easily recharge my hearing aids, presumably without having to leave the key in the ignition and all sorts of other powered stuff on. As long as electricity is produced from greenhouse gas-producing power plants, though, having a fully electric vehicle is not going to save the planet much. Hopefully, I’ll be consuming greener and greener electricity as time goes by…
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So you bought the Ford? Cool. Yeah, staying on topic is overrated. I might consider full electric if I move into town, but I really like the range of a hybrid. Gasoline (and diesel) are incredibly energy dense fuels.
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Try searching the web on “how many sticks of dynamite are in one gallon of gasoline?” No one seems to agree (I guess it depends a bit on the ignition conditions) but it’s a bunch. 
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I’m impressed! You are now a truck guy with a twist.
We now have a Kubota diesel powered light tower for back up power. We were out of power for 8 days.
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Our utility, CPS Energy, says to expect more blackouts in the future (and we have annoying transient ones from intense thunderstorms all the time, lasting from minutes to hours). For our electricity consumption usually, except in the heat of summer, we consume less than 600 kWh per month. So with turning some things off, we ought to be able to go ~10 days if necessary with the 150 kWh in the truck (all only available if fully charged, though!). I’ve thought about a gasoline or diesel powered backup generator in the past but its something extra uselessly sitting around almost all the time to be ~maintained whereas the truck is very useful when its not serving backup duty, too! A fuel-powered generator that I heard in action visiting a friend in Falls Church, VA, was very noisy. Ours will be absolutely silent. There are a lot of shortcomings with the Lightning but I don’t imagine going on 76 years of age that I’ll live long enough to see everything sorted out and I wanted to enjoy an EV while I’m still reasonably sentient and am still capable of driving without killing myself or my wife!
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We have a second electrical meter at a metal building. I plan to kill the power there and use the generator as needed to power that building. Return will take 2.5 years but we will have a back up power source for our home. If any needed power is needed anywhere else on the property the light tower will fill in nicely.
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Yeah Jim, I had a BMW i3 REX for a couple of years, bought it new, lovely car to drive and fast with it, amazingly agile in the snow and ice, 19" tyres that were very narrow, 0 to 60 in around 7 seconds…170BHP, about 180 miles range in the summer, plus another 80 miles with the REX (Range Extender). My main problem was public charging points in the Scottish Highlands, there wasn’t many, although I did charge a lot at home as I have 4KW of solar panels, but on dull days that’s not really cost-effective, and you kind of grudged paying for electricity when you could get it for free with your “Charge Card” (£20 a year admin fee, all the rest of your electricity was free) strangely enough, or as luck would have it, a new charge car electricity service station opened up 3 miles away from me the week I sold the i3… As for hearing aid rechargeable’s, you can keep them, but each to their own preferences. Enjoy your new Ford F-150 Lightning XLT. Cheers Kev 
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You make a very important point in your post. EVs use very advanced battery management systems to assure balanced charging and discharging,temperature cutoffs to protect the batteries, and usually a reserve set of batteries that can be brought “online”should one pack no longer perform to specs. No HA will have anything like that. There’s barely any room in there to begin with, these are tiny Lipo batteries of some chemical configuration (from clsssic to the lower voltage LiFe designs which I’m not sure are even available in the right form factors). The other big difference, changing a rechargeable battery in a HA is way easier (even if it needs a factory visit) than changing out EV battery sets.
And yes, those electric motors give incredible speed and generate excellent torque. The new Tesla S plaid edition (pretty sure it’s called plaid) is now the fastest production car available capable of 0-60 in just under 2 seconds. The quarter mile was also impressive 9.3 seconds. Top speed is 200 mph. Now those are amazing specs. No, it’s not cheap, but if you’re looking for say a Mercedes S class and AMG versions, the Tesla is a very competitive car looking at performance (oh yeah it measured at 1,100 hp).
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I think size is a constraint induced by the user of the device not wanting to reveal wearing HA’s and by marketing - HA’s were originally larger than today and it wouldn’t take much of an improvement in power density - for EV’s I understand the goal is to achieve ideally a 10-fold increase in power density with a newer, battery battery chemistry (which might not be Li-ion). I can already essentially practice battery management of range with ReSounds - the battery life of those rechargeables is significantly better than Phonak’s because of Phonak staying with Classic Bluetooth. Going from 80% to 20% with ReSound gives me 18-hours of usable battery life (6 hours per 20% charge) and one can stream a lot with very little dent in battery life, unlike streaming with Phonak’s “solution.”
So saying it can’t happen is just plain wrong - ReSound already belies what you’ve written. Phonak would have to upgrade battery size or switch to BLE, though.
Edit_Update: I just threw out the word “marketing” but “economics” might have been a better word to try to summarize EV batteries vs. hearing aid rechargeable batteries. An EV battery is still so expensive, even though greatly reduced in price in recent years, still about $125 per kWh. So an F-150 Lightning battery is $125/kWh x 150 kWh = ~$18,750. No one would buy an EV if the battery was only good for 5 years. So EV makers have to preach the gospel of how to get the most life out of your EV car battery and induce EV buyers to join the cult of battery lifespan preservation. A rechargeable HA battery is so small, its replacement is nowhere near as painful, and not worrying too much if the battery ages relatively rapidly fits nicely with the tendency of many HA wearers to get new HA’s every 5 years (or less) because of evolving HA technology. But with a little improvement in battery power density compared to what EV makers aspire to ( just a 50% power density improvement for HA rechargeables?) and/or maybe a slightly bigger HA body size, 20% charged and 80% charged could be redefined as the new 0% charged and 100% charged levels and HA OEMs could extend the usable lifespan of their rechargeables without having the user really think too hard about it - and what harm would there be to give rechargeable HA users the same advice EV makers are giving their buyers to get the most life possible out of the expensive product they bought? The possibility for good battery management in rechargeables is borderline now but if no one tries, it won’t get any better and manufacturers don’t even have anything as simple as reminder alerts built into their apps for crossing user-defined low or high charge levels or the ability to stop charging up the HA’s at a preferred high charge level that’s less than 100% charged. It would be great if battery power density improved some more but in the meantime I’d like better facility in the smartphone app to allow a user, if that person wanted, to practice better battery power management just like EV owners can with a lot of help from their car software. Perhaps its the economics of HA rechargeable batteries again- it’s not worth the effort to develop such monitoring, easier just to treat rechargeables as a longer-lived form of disposable battery.
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Simple Calculation Showing a Small Increase in Size HA Body Size Could Lead to a Big Relative Increase in Rechargeable Battery Capacity.
Our perception of size is ~1-dimensional. If asked to compare HA body sizes between two HA’s (it’s been done on this forum before), we might compare the two lengths vs. each other, the two widths, the two thicknesses. If one HA body was 10% bigger in all dimensions, would that be a big deal? Maybe not. But it could significantly increase relative battery capacity. Because battery capacity is a function of volume (dimensions cubed) - the increased mass or space occupied by battery material.
If every dimension increases 10%, the volume of the hearing aid (length x width x depth) is 1.1 cubed greater, i.e., 1.1 x 1.1 x 1.1. That’s a 1.331 times increase in overall volume of the HA body. What if this 33.1% increase in volume was all devoted to adding more Li-polymer battery to the HA body? Is the HA to begin with 100% battery? Certainly not. If the battery occupied 50% of the original HA body and you increased its size by 33.1% of the original body size, the battery is now 33.1% increase in original body size to HA battery increase/50% of original body size is battery = 60% increase in HA battery size for only a 10% increase in each dimension.
OK. Let’s get extreme. Let’s say the original HA battery size was 75% of the original body. Then 33.1% increase in body size to increased battery size / 75% original body size is battery = 44.4% increase in HA battery size for only a 10% increase in each dimensions.
I think both these thought experiments overestimate the original size of the battery as a proportion of the overall HA body size so a 33.1% increase in body size entirely devoted to more battery likely would be an even bigger increase in relative battery size-if the battery were 33% of the original body, 33%/33% would be a 100% increase in battery size for a 10% increase in each dimension. But the point of these calculations is that even if the Li-ion battery already occupies a substantial portion of a rechargeable HA body, with a very modest 10% increase in each linear dimension, you can significantly increase the relative volume of the rechargeable battery and get enough extra battery capacity not to have to go between 0% charged and 100% charged in using the Li-ion battery. But users want small hearing aids and HA OEMs want to sell them new HA’s every so often so who wants to make a hearing aid bigger than the competition’s and one that lasts much longer so there’s less inducement to upgrade every few years.
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So just checking to see if this was my thread. appears to have gotten off topic!
I wear glasses full time. I wear ones with the thinnest temples possible(titanium wire). They are pricey but worth it. I wear Oticon Opn S1 rechargeable ones and find that the fact that they have a T-coil as well is very useful. My hearing is of course getting worse so am about to be fitted with Power molds. Loving the fact that I can just charge my aids overnight just like my iPhone.
Coincidentally, for that very reason I am about to get titanium frames!