I can definitely say that I’m so glad I have trad batteries having been through hurricane Ian and no power for 9 days. I’d have a great deal of difficulty communicating without my hearing aids.
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You definitely need to be prepared if you rely on rechargeables. (Perhaps comparable to being sure one has enough disposable batteries to get by.)Options for recharging rechargeables in a power outage. Some sort of powerbank that is typically used for recharging phones. A recharger with a built in powerbank. A generator.
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That’s why I never buy a rechargeable hearing aid. I’d wait till a future generation of chargeable hearing aids that would last a at least a week with one charge
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It;s no more problem for HAs than it is for a phone. If a power failure is in your future, just make sure you have a phone charger you can plug into your car. If flooding is common and a functioning car might be hard to come by, have a power bank charged and ready as a standby, which you should have for your phone anyway.
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IMHO the HA manufacturer don’t deserve the mark on the state of their rechargeable HA, they didn’t get it right.
HA are critical items for most people, they aren’t like mobile phone or smart watches (simple Casio watch can last 10 years on same battery), so to provide a critical tool with 10 to 30 hours of usage then it degrades over time, is just wong.
And TBH, they should be ashamed of themselves, we are talking about people’s lives, who rely day in day out on their HA to survive and communicate.
Also, those manufacturers who make it hard for the user to service the rechargeable batteries, should double ashamed.
Normal 312 batteries last what 5 days, couldn’t they take that as minimum benchmark and add 25% degradation, and see if they can make equivalent rechargeable batteries?
Please, use like for a like, for example:
-Replace 13 with equivalent (not 312+25%), 13 + 25%
-Replace 675 with equivalent (not 312 or 13 +25%), 675 + 25%
I hope their R&Ds are reading this and do a better job next time, ASAP.
Also, I could say the same thing for Bluetooth implementation and the Right to repair, but they’re for another topic.
I don’t get it, do they conduct real life trials, are the feedbacks they are getting true or fake, or are those decisions a stone cold corporate decision.
Sorry for the rant
Please, don’t tel me about a charger, because there a lots of situations where you just don’t have time or are able to charge… Thx
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those of us who much prefer rechargeables—and that seem to be a majority of users (?)–would be annoyed if manufactures didn’t offer them. It’s easy to imagine situations where having a traditional battery leaves one up the creek once it dies. Camping and forgot backups; visiting a small town and batteries are unavailable, etc. Or–there’s a hurricane and you’ve run out of batteries, and none are available. Like wyatt, my aids came with a seperate rechargeable storage battery that holds 2-3 new charges. I get 32 hours or so per charge. In a desperate situation I could ration my ha use; but it’s never ever been an issue. i can’[t make my decisions based on worst case scenarios that likely will never occur As stated, folks who live in areas with a lot of power outages most likely know the drill and have back up. Anyway for me, rechargeable aids are very convenient and I love not having to remember to shop for batteries all the time.
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It all depends on the individual, I have the More1 rechargeable and the OPNS1 rechargeable. The OPNS aids are my backup aids so I am keeping them ready to use. Like right now my More1 aids are being checked out by Oticon to see if the static I hear in them is the electronics or possibly the receivers. My aids are from the VA as I am a disabled veteran and my loss is such that my audiologist demeans it necessary that I have two sets of aids that fit my hearing needs, just in case of repairs. As for as worries of the aids being rechargeable, as a good scout I always have a backup plan.
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YOU SAID IT!!! Glad you survived and had the “ears” needed for this biblical event. This is a point worth chiseling in stone. And I’m a happy camper wearing rechargeable Phonak Lumity Life aids as I say it!
I’m EVER so glad I have backup aids - Phonak Marvels - with batteries. As it is, in a normal day, I have to switch to the Marvels after 13 hrs of rechargeables. Your experience tells me that in an emergency I should have the Marvels ON, batteries IN HAND and if there’s room in the evacuation kit, grab the newer Life aids. When and IF Phonak comes out with a Lumity Life battery option, I’ll go for it.
It seems that manufacturers are increasingly switching to rechargeables across the board. It’s another classic example of “Don’t Walk the Walk, so Can’t Talk the Talk!” as they have no idea of our needs. We don’t wear hearing aids for ear candy. We wear them to hear for safety and our own good health. So manufacturers should be ever aware that hearing aid users have different needs than those on the assembly line just cranking them out.
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That is my story to a “T”. Absolutely need backups … and I’m so paranoid about being without ears that I have kept EVERY SINGLE PAIR of aids from the 1990s to today. I even dug out an old pair of AGX ITE aids to wear during the pandemic when hubs would cut 'n color my hair. I didn’t want him snipping through my ear wires or dyeing my BTE unit chocolate brown. 
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I’m in that camp, too, LOL! But the irony for me is that almost every single day I have to swap to my battery-operated Marvel aids. I honestly don’t know why I’m only getting 13 hrs out of my Lumity Life aids. I don’t stream more than 2 hrs of TV at night. I thought I was done buying HA batteries? But indeed, I have to mark my calendar and swap in a new set of batts in my Marvels on Day 6 every single week so I’m never caught with them dead when I make the nightly switch.
Sigh.
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I just read the notes my VA audiologist put in my records after my appointment this last Friday. He bluntly said that I must have my main and backup aids available at all times. Well my main aids are in the repair lab at this time. I am asking for the Oticon OWN1 aids as my main aids so the More1 aids will be my backups and my OPNS1 for a backup to the backup. My audiologist didn’t disagree but has to get it approved. I have also reopened my disability claim as my hearing loss is to the point I can’t really communicate properly without my aids
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You lived for 9 days with zero power at all?
Have you ever seen The Marx Bros movie “A Night at the Opera”? Cuz your backups for the backup pair of backups sounds a LOT like the dialogue between Groucho and Chico about The Contract - and what part of it isn’t needed!
One can never have enough backups is what I’m thinking.
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Let me start off by saying I’m very new to the world of HAs. Please take what I say here with that consideration.
But I’m also a retired product development engineer with substantial experience in electronics packaging. It seems to me this is a problem we don’t need to have.
My understanding is that some are plenty satisfied with their rechargeable aids. Those who are not are typically those with more profound loss, so the aids have to work harder. So they don’t last long enough.
I think there’s also a bit of ‘don’t want to change, things were fine as the were’ attitude here. Claims that backups are necessary seem a little weak when no one is complaining about not being able to use replaceable batteries in their phone.
So my question is, would rechargeables be acceptable if they gave twice the run time they do now?
Background: Up until a few months ago I had never even thought about hearing aids much at all. I had seen them. My closest encounter was a colleague with profound loss years ago. He wore two aids, they were about 2/3 the length of his ear, looked clunky, but I figured he needed them. So no big deal.
Fast forward to just recently when I started looking into them for me, and I’m astounded at how small the BTE models are. I mean, really tiny. So, small is good, it’s very techie, but do they NEED to be that small? Seems like people got along just fine with the bigger ones. Would it be acceptable if your BTE aids were maybe 10 mm longer? You know, like the diameter of another battery?
There should be no reason at all that you couldn’t put two batteries in these things. Wire them in parallel and all the electronics work just as before. Even the charger wouldn’t have to change, if there’s enough headroom for the taller aids. You could even have standard and long duration versions of the same models. You could try out the standard, and if it wasn’t enough down the road it would be easy to re-case them with the added battery. The electrical portion of that change is no more than two solder joints.
The only difference is they take twice as long to charge from full dead. And they have a longer life because they aren’t as deeply discharged if you still charge them every day.
For all the complaints I’ve seen here, why is this not already a thing?
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That is a question you would have to ask the hearing aid companies. And then there are the ones that are afraid that their aids will be seen. I don’t care if my aids are seen but I very much prefer to have my hearing aids in my ear and not hanging over the back of my ears. Yes my 2 latest sets of aids are MiniRite aids with the electronics behind the ear, they are small and don’t bother me that much. But I can hear the difference between the microphones being behind my ear and in my ears and I prefer them in my ears.
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Short answer: YOU BETCHA!!!
Your suggestion to make these double-battery sized in length tho? Not so crazy about that one. As it is, the rechargeable Phonak Lumity Life aids I’m wearing (which only give me 13 hrs use MAX) are noticeably larger and heavier than my Phonak Marvel battery aids (which give me almost 6 days of use).
I wonder if the rechargeable battery itself could be reinvented in some kind of material that would HOLD a charge longer. Cuz you’re right: us folks who are truly serious-to-profoundly deaf need the power in our aids! I have P90 receivers, so that’s as good as it gets. Short of a miracle ear hair cell replacement, I’ll need aids all the rest of my years I’m on this planet.
The other less attractive alternative would be to have a turbo-charging unit that’s small and quick, so that in FIVE minutes we’d get maybe FIVE more hours of use. There is no such device on the market that I know of. Even five minutes in a really critical spot would not be good. Picture a long international flight. One staggers off the plane and joins a loooooooong and slooooooow line going through Customs with some pretty grumpy security folks asking questions you better have the answer to PDQ. To hesitate, point at cinderblock ears or go “DUH!” is not going to be the ideal scenario here.
I also think that in addition to the limitations of battery life, today’s aids are getting a LOT more complex having Bluetooth and then being connected and paired to so many electronic devices.
Your observation that: “Claims that backups are necessary seem a little weak when no one is complaining about not being able to use replaceable batteries in their phone.” does not really apply to ME cuz 1.) I need my aids to HEAR a lot more than I need a phone charged up and working and 2.) my cell phone battery stays charged up WAY WAY longer than my aids cuz I only use it to answer calls and occasionally surf the net to find info (Yelp, Amazon, Google Map, etc.)
Will be curious to see how others chime in here with their own perspectives!
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I can piggyback a backup battery to my iPhone that uses the MagSafe connection and continue to using my phone I can’t do that for my aids. Yes my aids are rechargeable but as needed I can power down one set and power up my backup aids.
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Hey, I don’t know what to debate about Traditional vs Rechargeable.
But I can definitely tell this.
Traditional battery probably never die. They will always available sooner or later.
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To hear Dr Cliff and a few other audiologist, they are pushing the rechargeable aids as hard as they can. I really don’t understand it. Disposable and rechargeable have their uses and both should remain available.
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