I think one mistake to make is to assume that the sequence that works for you has to be everyone else’s care sequence, too.
I don’t charge my HA’s while I’m asleep. My protocol follows along the idea of Apple’s new “optimized charging” scheme. If charging up and keeping your HA’s at 100% charge most of the night is not optimal (per Apple’s example not to do so) why start charging your HA’s when you go to bed? Unless you literally have to rush out the door every morning as soon as you leap out of bed?
The wife reads an electronic newspaper in the morning cover-to-cover it seems and doesn’t like any talking while she’s doing so (and I can hear pretty well what she says without my HA’s, anyway). So I can take 25 min to an hour, easily in the morning to charge my HA’s while I eat breakfast, read my own copy of the paper, brush my teeth, wash my face, dress. An hour of charging will give me 14 hours of use (I normally do 30 min in the morning, 30 min in the afternoon, though, to give my ears a break from wearing occlusive molds).
If I wanted, I could dry my HA’s all night long in a dryer (or put the charging case inside a drying jar) but I don’t think that it’s necessary since neither ReSound nor my audi, with decades of experience since the 1980’s, advised me to do so (in fact, she guffawed softly when I first got my HA’s and asked her how to dry them!).
With BT LE Audio coming along, I’m not sure I want to keep my current HA’s five years but otherwise it would be an interesting experiment to see how well the Li-ion batteries withstand 5 years of use and how well the HA’s themselves survive with nothing but plain old air drying. If you’ve ever mopped your own kitchen floor, you should know that it doesn’t take more than half an hour or so to thoroughly dry. I don’t see why HA’s, which are nowhere near as wet as the floor, should take heating and desiccant to dry out while sitting for ~8 hours overnight if a wet floor can dry in half an hour, no heating, no desiccant.
The following is an undergraduate experiment in Denmark, done at ~44% RH. Unfortunately, the experimenters don’t define the temperature of the hot plate under the cloth in the heating experiment *** (see below) but it shows that applying heat only doubles the drying rate that can be achieved with a 2 m/s breeze (4.5 mph). Most of us don’t have such breezes in our houses but we do have a forced air AC/heating system that comes on several times an hour and I also keep the case by a window where there is always an inside/outside temperature differential leading to window drafts, which undoubtedly also helps drying.
Conservation physics: The physics of drying cloth
*** in Figure 2 of the linked reference, the amount of heat applied by the metal plate is defined as that sufficient to prevent evaporative cooling of the cloth, which with no heat source would cool the cloth to 13.3 deg C (56 deg F). The heating supplied to the plate on which the cloth rests keeps the cloth at the ambient room temperature, 20 deg C (68 deg F). I doubt for the amount of moisture in HA’s there’s going to be any significant evaporative cooling as any moisture evaporates.
