Very few ITE aids have rechargeable batteries at this time I am sure that will increase. I believe there is a place for both rechargeable and disposable batteries. Me with my hearing lose would like very much like to have both types seeing I have to always have backup aids available in case of needing repairs.
Besides the car battery, if you value your computer equipment, you might want to have a UPS (uninterruptible power supply). In normal use, it’s plugged into a wall outlet and its sizeable lead acid battery is always close to fully charged when there’s electricity in your house circuit. UPSs are also made to double as surge suppressors and line conditioning devices (protect against moderate over- or undervoltage as well as spikes). Solid State Disks are a lot more susceptible to power mishaps than older mechanical magnetic hard drives. So, if you’re running a recent computer with an SSD inside and it’s not a battery-powered laptop or tablet, it ought to be run off a UPS. Our UPSs have USB ports on them through which one can recharge phones, tablets, hearing aids, etc.
And power banks and efficient, foldable solar panels are a lot cheaper than they used to be. We have two cars, two UPSs, and a very large collapsible solar panel plus a very large power bank. So, if anything comes along that can totally destroy all these power resources, we’ll be lucky if we live through such a disaster ourselves and just thankful to still be alive.
And within a year I hope to own a Ford F-150 Lightning with the “Power-Your-House” option. Its battery holds 131 kWhr of electricity, enough to power my house for 3 to 10 days depending on how I ration power use, so I doubt I’m going to have trouble charging any rechargeable hearing aids. It will be hooked into our circuit panel in the garage when its parked at home.
I’d say the limits of rechargeability are more in people’s imaginations than in reality. Yeah, the electricity is going to be lost and there go the rechargeables and anything that could recharge them, but the house and the flood and winds didn’t wash away your supply of disposable batteries and never will - you sleep with them strapped to your chest?
BTW, a principal reason for wanting to buy the Ford F-150 EV is not the desire to go green, etc. (although that’s a factor). It’s just that electricity is so relatively unreliable in the State of Texas, I don’t like living in the dark and freezing for days on end as we had to do after the great Valentine’s Day freeze-out in 2021. At least we’ll be able to have light throughout the house and run a few space heaters where we need them if the same thing occurs again. It was 9 deg F outside. The temp inside our house fell to 44 deg F. My daughter’s house in Austin was something like 36 deg F and they pitched a tent in their living room to have a bit more warmth inside the tent. Power outages in Texas are a regular occurrence. So advance preparation is helpful. Whether or not you want to keep rechargeable HA’s running.
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@SpudGunner. I’ve forgotten whether it’s Dr. Cliff or Matthew Allsop, but one of the two in his review of the Lumity criticizes Phonak for only making it available as a rechargeable. He (whichever guy it was) says 85% of his patients prefer rechargeables, so maybe the current Lumity will be OK with them, but, IIRC, the audi says the other 15% of his patients adamantly prefer disposables and predicts that Phonak is going to lose those customers to other HA brands that offer the disposable battery option.
@jim_lewis: Thanks for your input, Jim. I don’t doubt what you’re saying, but I was actually looking for a more robustly-derived statistic than a "DrCliff says his patients say … " source, for obvious reasons.
I’m curious to know whether a properly-designed study has looked at this objectively and come to any more-than-anecdotal conclusions.
But thanks for your reply: I do appreciate your weighing in in my challenge to @jeffrey .
Hi, @SpudGunner
One can always say that Consumer Reports didn’t do their survey with the proper controls, etc., but here from 2020 is a post that I made that said Consumer Reports found in a survey of 17,000 readers that rechargeability was one of the top features that users were looking for when buying new hearing aids. To me, that sounds like a bit more than anecdotal evidence. Rechargeable versus battery hearing aids - #11 by jim_lewis
Two things make me think about actually going with disposable batteries in my next set of HA’s.
First, when I got rechargeables, I didn’t factor in the intense summer heat in Texas with increasing global warming. Probably not good to wear rechargeables outdoors for long periods when it’s 106 deg F or more outside (in 2011 we were hitting summer highs in the one hundred and teens!). Second was my experience in getting “refurbishment replacements” (an HA exchange from ReSound) that had not so great Li-ion batteries in the replacements compared to the ones that I turned that still had great batteries after 3 years use by keeping SOC between about 35% and 70% charge (easy to do with ReSound). Going disposable would avoid those two shortcomings. But other than those worries, I do like knowing how much charge I have at any time and being able to start out each day with a fresh charge and know that I won’t run out any time during the day.
@jim_lewis: Yes, Jim, this is what I contend … and intention to buy parameters are far from the informed opinions of respondents who have actually worn rechargeables for a year.
Please meet Hanky, Hanky is a Rhode Island car salesman a real good one, he used to be a State trooper, so he knows pretty much every one in the County.
Sleepy Joe (we call him Joe) a good fella at the edge of the County, wants to buy a car and he went to see Hanky, they used to play Ice hockey together back in the days.
Hanky has a good selection of cars and he is proposing 2 cars:
- A Tesla X with battery powered engine up to 16hours runtime and tap control steering wheel.
and - A Dodge Charger SXT twin engines with user replaceable batteries inside and a V8 conventional petrol supercharge engine, that drives like a dream.
Although Hanky and Joe like the Charger, they focus on the Tesla and the easy rechargeablity it offers; Hancky proceeds to confess that 85% of his sells are a Tesla.
The thing is, Hancky failed to mention that he hasn’t had that many Charger delivered in the last 2 years, the simple reason be it he has been hammered by Tesla to sell their cars at lucrative margins.
So his majority of client base are a Tesla owners by definition.
Joe a happy chap at end went with a brand new Tesla, all with a big happy smile.
Fast forward to today, Joe is as happy as anyone, he drives his beloved 1967 C2 Corvette Stingray and he loves it, although sometimes he forgets how to drive; and for his Tesla, well, it is gathering dust for the last year and half after the battery failed, and it cost half the car to replace the battery.
Moral of the story, …
I know maybe it is far fetched, but you might see the analogy.
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The only problem with the story is that it’s a fairy tale:
Tesla batteries are designed to last 300,000-500,000 miles and the rumor is that Tesla is working on developing a battery that can last a million miles. However, currently-available batteries are not yet capable of lasting a million miles and might need a battery replacement during the lifetime of the car.
Source: https://www.thesolaradvantage.net/how-long-do-tesla-batteries-last/
The 300,000 to 500,000 miles is Musk’s claim. The actual warranty for a Tesla Model S is 8 years or 150,000 miles, which is a lot better than the warranty on the drive train of any ICE vehicle.
I think we should stick to rechargeable hearing aids … as well as the facts.
BTW, according to Ford, the maintenance costs of a Ford F-150 EV are 40% lower than the ICE version of the same vehicle. And Ford, too, claims that their batteries will last far longer than the 8 years/100,000 mile warranty even if the owner charges the vehicle every day to 100% charge. So, if you only do the 20% to 80% SOC range, you’ll do far better. The same goes for rechargeable HA’s. So, a rechargeable HA that you have to fully charge every day is not going to do as well in the long run as one where you can treat it with TLC like an EV and not max out on the entire charge range every day.
The “mpg” cost of driving an EV depends on what state you live in, too. Electricity is most expensive in Hawaii, much cheaper in states like Texas. So, depending on your cost of electricity compared to the cost of gasoline, and with the reduced maintenance costs compared to an ICE vehicle, you can more than recoup the cost of replacing the batteries from your savings on gas and maintenance of a large EV vehicle like an F-150 as compared to its gas-guzzling counterpart.
I have to use bit battery types. My CI has rechargeable batteries and my HA has disposable size13. I carry HA batteries with me all the time, which really is unnecessary. As the Resound did goes for a further 7 hours after chimes it’s going flat. Where as my CI gives me a chime then 4-5 mins later it’s dead as a dodo.
My CI did come with disposable batteries but the battery compartment needs to be tightened with a screw driver type thingy… I’ve used my CI batteries once since activation, so 2 boxes of 675 batteries went back to my AuD after about 10 months and I’ve not used them since. If we go away we have to take a owed board, battery Y charger cords and power adapters, breeze dryer along with its USB cords and adapter. It’s painful carting all this stuff.
Of the 2 battery types I far prefer disposable batteries.
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I GET IT @Baltazard ! Exactly! Exactly!
And - for my situation - I wish I had been given the choice to stay with disposable batteries.
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@jim_lewis Sorry I didn’t mean it was you in my monologue, it is just what I found analogous.
And for engine lifespan, cmon, how many people still drive their 30+ years old petrol/deisel powered cars, which still hold and work like the first day they bought it.
But for battery powered cars, well…
Note:
There is space for both type of batteries, but respect other’s freedom and let them have choices, a choice to have disposable batteries in whatever they like.
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I think the disposable battery types are acting like the folks who opt for rechargeables are agin them. Seems to me it’s just the marketing decisions of the HA OEMs. So rather than pillorying the perceived disadvantages of rechargeables, folks should be protesting directly to the HA OEMs and taking their bucks to the OEMs who still offer disposables. Perhaps there are environmental concerns about disposables. I don’t know. But maybe every product should come with an estimate of its environment cost. Somehow, we now live in a world where there’s fairly complete nutrition information even for fresh baked goods in a supermarket these days. Perhaps there should be similar information when purchasing electronic devices, etc. And when the world gets really desperate from the effects of overflowing with people and waste (think the Disney flick Wall-E!), maybe they’ll issue pollution rations, and you get to decide how to spend them! Kinda like the idea of a carbon tax.
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@jim_lewis: This is all very true and good. My only quibble is that the audiologist I was working with when I got my Mores basically said: “You say you want to stay with Oticon? Fine … this is a good HA, however it only comes in rechargeable. Take it or leave it.”
I wasn’t offered the choice of another model or make - and the Oricon More sell was a hard sell.
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Leaving home with only the clothes on your back and the hearing aids in your ears could happen anywhere. Unlikely for any person on any given day, but not far-fetched. You don’t have to be in Florida or Ukraine for it to happen.
But if it happens to you, are you better off with disposable battery aids or rechargeable battery aids in your ears? Either way you may be without working aids for a while. But it seems like disposable batteries will be a lot easier to replace. They’re a standard item, and they’re stocked somewhere not too far away, if you live in a populated area. Replacing a hearing aid battery charger? Maybe they’re backordered, or maybe your aids are a few years old and that particular charger design isn’t made anymore.
I think I’ve read everything that’s been written on these forums about rechargeables, and I remain convinced that, in their current state of development, they’re a terrible idea, except for people with manual dexterity problems for whom the difficulty of replacing batteries is the overriding concern. And those people aren’t always well-served by hearing aid charger design either.
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As I have said before it comes done to users choice. I am retired but I live out in the forest where everyone around me including me have whole home generators. We have been lucky over the last 5 years and I have only needed my generator once and then only about 4 hours. But the area has a history of long power outages.
My wife and I love to go camping so we have a generator that is mounted to the camp trailer. It is called planning a head. I was in the Navy for 8 years and my dad before me was in the Navy during WW2, I was taught and advised to always have a togo pack packed and ready to go on a moments notice. I still have an up to dated to go pack packed and ready to go. Planned readiness is always something we should always be thinking about but few do.
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@cvkemp: As always, Chuck, it’s a great yarn and a practical lesson. It’s true … more people should take it upon themselves to be prepared.
But the yarn doesn’t solve the problem for people like me who weren’t offered a choice, and who find out, too late, that rechargeable batteries aren’t the panacea that manufacturers claim them to be.
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I haven’t been considering a prepper situation, societal collapse, if that’s what you’re talking about.
Like you when I got the More aids there wasn’t a disposable battery option. But there was when I got the OPNS and I agreed to the rechargeable aids. With proper planning the rechargeable aids are okay at least for me seeing I am retired and don’t spend my days streaming.
Yes before I retired I spend anywhere from 6 to 12 hours on the phone, and I could only wish for the capability to stream the calls. That is why I prefer ITE aids, because I could wear the headphones over my aids without looking like a fool with the headphones on the back of my ears and head.
Can you use your aids while charging them?
I just ordered Oticon OWN1 and they only come in 312 battery format. Backup aids and a USB power block are a good idea, and I would use that for my phone. Which I can use while charging.
Somewhat related, there are replaceable rechargeables (for some hearibng aids). Not sure how new this is. I saw them in either a Phonak or Oticon document. I should have made better note of it.
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