" The regulation of the European Parliament and the Council will apply to all batteries including all waste portable batteries,"
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I’ve read an article few years ago, that South Korea too had a legislation where FM radio in smartphone is mandatory.
My impression is that the European regulation requires recycling of batteries. I didn’t see anything about banning disposables.
Have a spare pair of hearing aids setup for my current hearing loss. Spare batteries. Spare wax guards. Packaged. Ready to go.
I’m in limbo right now. My oldest Phonak hearing aids were set up by the audiologist that quit.I shall try them out and see how they work; if not adequate I’ll pay or ask that they be set up again by the practitioner who fixed my Phonak Audeo Paradise P90R’s.
edit:
You asked about carrying the charger around all the time…that would drive me nuts…
**I have trouble getting out the door with everything I need in my work day. The charger I have is a Phonaks box. It requires a USB input from a power source. **
So…charger + cable + power source (a brick!) would be essential. And maybe a spare cable because they don’t last well in my hands.
Years ago I bought a vest from Scott E Vest. It’s intended for US customers that carry a firearm. I don’t have one of those. Advantage is that you can keep your stuff in the vest pockets, put the vest on and leave the house. That vest gear is expensive. And it doesn’t last. I’ve had about 5? of their products.
Now Phonak has changed stuff out.
That’s why the spare pair of hearing aids is so important!
Phonak is getting worse and worse. The Lumity doesn’t allow replacement batteries.
My hearing is bad enough that hearing aids are essential. However, the Paradise P90R’s with rechargeable batteries will only last me for a day.
Quit watching… The Walking Dead?
In a world where you can be anything, be kind!
The answer is in my post from a week ago:
As of now, the majority of RIC product families are available with disposable batteries. The future trend is another matter. Besides, Phonak Lumity has outsize impact due to the brand’s popularity and the Roger tie-in. Their rechargeable battery life is marginal with the available technology, as can be seen from the complaints here, yet they saw fit to force their RIC customers into rechargeables now anyway. I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s eager to see their next flagship offering.
Jeffrey, I wasn’t thinking of you when I wrote that post. I think you’re a nice guy and I like you. And in fact, I don’t think anyone on this site is shilling for the industry on this issue. But encouraging people to “get with the program” on rechargeables helps the industry, not the customers.
I have a package of 312 batteries from Costco that’s labeled bi-lingually for sale in Canada. The product name in French Canadian is “Piles Pour Audioprothèses”. Look at that last word. My guess is that it’s related to the English word “prosthesis”, which means an artificial body part. Hearing aids do supplement, and in some cases replace, a part of our body. For some of us they’re needed because of damage to our “original equipment”, for others they’re necessary because the original equipment was defective.
That brings me to the phone analogy. One problem with it is that a phone, but not a hearing aid, is usable while it’s being charged. But the more fundamental problem is that a hearing aid, unlike a phone, functions as part of our body and enables one of our basic bodily senses to work. Unlike a phone, it connects you to your immediate surroundings in a fundamental way that we’ve evolved to depend on.
Thanks. That was a good post that I hadn’t seen. The Starkey and Signia models are really pretty new and indeed come out with disposable battery models, although likely with some reduced features because they won’t work on lower voltage systems.
I’m sorry, I didn’t remember your hospital post, just the other guy’s. But whether or not hospital experiences are reported here, there’s no doubt that people do end up in the hospital unexpectedly. Older people, who are more likely to need hearing aids, are also more likely to end up in the hospital. When you’re in the hospital everyone around you is in a hurry, and it really helps to be able to hear what’s going on.
This whole hospital discussion, including the pooh-poohing of its importance, seems to assume that people always get taken to the hospital from home, where they have all their supplies and have a chance to remember to take them. But you could have a medical emergency when you’re out and about, or you could be in an accident. With a set of disposable battery aids in your ears, and a little pack of spare batteries in your pocket at all times, you’ve got your hearing covered for many days.
Thanks x475.
If I was buying new hearing aids and had a choice, that would be my choice too. replaceable batteries.
However, my primary hearing aids have rechargeable batteries. Phonak Audeo Paradise P90R’s.
What would I do in a storm with rechargeable hearing aids? I have a brick dedicated to my hearing aids now. I’ll keep it charged so I can recharge my hearing aids in a power outage.
That’s my decision for now.
I have Signias Stylettos AX; with streaming and wearing them all day usually they have 40% charge left by the end of the day. Their box is also a portable charger which together allow me to go without caring about charging for more than a week. Portable charger is almost always fully charged since I just throw it at wireless charging mat without thinking.
All my devices are USB-C, my laptop, my phone [my phone can charge my portable charger wirelessly too], etc. And I could use any of them to recharge.
Having them for more than a year, I’ve encountered the sound indicating low charge JUST ONCE, and I was really confused and puzzled because I couldn’t figure out what was that sound and where it was coming from! 
I think the likelihood of such dire situations must be considered. Implicit to such a scenario is that one has no friends or relatives who could bring your essentials to the hospital, etc. And hospital personnel will be so clueless they won’t be able to communicate with you. Maybe they have a device that does Live Transcribe, even Live Translate. You’ll be half-dead and incapacitated for days, and the main worry is, “Will I have my hearing aids?” Folks are hypothesizing situations as crucial determiners that will rarely, if ever, happen to most people, especially if they plan ahead. Likewise, the ability to cope in such situations is being seriously downplayed, such as carrying a rechargeable case, which can be worn on a belt and recharged with a USB cable (and wall adapter), which is available ~everywhere, and recharging one HA at a time while you still use the other, etc.
There’s a lot of potent emotional charge going on that’s clouding consideration of what’s likely and feasible. If you absolutely can’t get by an hour, a day, or a week without hearing aids, you shouldn’t go anywhere without carrying a backup HA pair, be it rechargeable or disposable. What if one of your regular hearing aids just breaks? You won’t be able to hear in one ear, and the world will come to an end…
Edit_Update: To go to a parallel world with vision, what if you really need glasses and can’t see anything very well without them? Shouldn’t you always buy extremely rugged “sports” frames and carry a spare pair with you in case you fall and smash your glasses and your head against a concrete sidewalk and have to be taken to the hospital and lie in bed for days? What will you do not being able to see without that spare pair of glasses you should have always been carrying? That’s kinda parallel to the extreme situations I see people hypothesizing here in which one absolutely needs disposable battery-powered HA’s to be able to cope…
I have, I guess, an average amount of experience in hospitals as a patient, as a care partner, and as a visitor. Given what I think is likely and what degree of uncertainty I’m willing to tolerate, I’m satisfied with disposable battery aids and a pack of batteries to take care of my hearing needs. You’re the one spinning scenarios…I need an extra pair of aids, I’ll be half-dead and incapacitated for days, I need sports glasses plus an extra pair of glasses.
Is there some externality associated with my (and everyone else’s) cheap, small and convenient hearing aid batteries that’s impacting you in some way?
That’s simply not true. I’m replying to the emergency away-from-home scenario that you spun up with conditions in which you imagined rechargeable aids simply would not work. I wore rechargeable ReSound HA’s for 3 1/2 years. In any situation where I’d be away from home for any length of time, I took my CHARGED recharging case with me on a belt pouch. I never had a situation in 3 1/2 years where either of my HA’s ran out of charge whereas the pro-disposable group here is trying to conjure up situations, such as you tried to do in the post I replied to, in which rechargeables just won’t work, no friends or family or hospital employees will find a way to help you out, etc.
I just don’t accept that in a real emergency, hurricane, tornado, wind storm, etc., one won’t be able to cope, with or without hearing aids. People managed to get by in calamities long before there were even hearing aids. Caring human beings don’t abandon the disadvantaged. They find a way.
I also don’t buy “I’m such a civilized comfort-creature that I can’t live a minute, an hour, a day, a week, … without all the comforts of HA’s that I love.” What would one do back in mid-20th century during whatever emergency you want to conjure up? There weren’t even mass-market analog HA’s then…
The scenarios that I included in my reply were to mirror the “you’re going to be caught in this emergency situation with HA’s and disposables are the only answer” improbability. Trying to parallel in a cartoonish way the stretch you’re going to with being laid up in the hospital and no way to deal with rechargeable HA’s.
I guess I was lucky? I was over on Kauai for 3 mos when 2020 began. As the weeks trickled by, I was more worried about getting Covid on an island with 11 ICU beds.
I don’t recall if I’d packed a 3-mo supply, cuz Costco and Amazon would (presumably!) bail me out? However, there wasn’t a drug store, grocery store or hardware store that had any Purel, face mask or sani wipes left. Seriously. We heard from one clerk at the local Longs (still in biz over there) that one guy would come in at store opening every Thu to buy up all the hand sanitizers delivered.
Wish I coulda met him in a back alley with my SUP oar. 
If I had to use rechargeable aids, I would of course try to make them work for me. From what I read here it seems doable, if inconvenient at times. If my aids stopped working, I would of course have no choice but to try to cope with the situation.
Now that I’ve said that, do you still object to my advocating for the technology that I, and some others, consider most convenient and reliable?
Both Jim and I wear hearing aids with disposable batteries. They definitely have their pluses. I can’t speak for Jim, but it’s the catastrophizing that I find annoying. It seems like there are better things to worry about.
I have no problem at all. My Omnias are powered by size 13 disposable batteries. I chose that option not because I didn’t think I couldn’t handle power outages or other emergencies with rechargeables. I think the real problem with rechargeables is that after the warranty period is up, there is no easy, inexpensive way to deal with a rechargeable battery weakening from age and extensive use. With disposables, my HA’s are more likely to be functional long after the warranty period ends.
It seems disposable battery HA fans try to conjure scenarios in which rechargeables just won’t work. If someone points out there’s a way to make rechargeables work, that’s not being against disposable battery-powered HAs. In capitalism and in democracies, minorities sometimes end up on the short end of the stick. There are lots of items I liked that I can no longer buy because they didn’t get the $ vote from the majority of folks. Unfortunately, disposable battery power HA’s are likely to be subject to the same economic vicissitudes. Hot competition may be good for driving prices down - it also drives less popular choices out of the market, unfortunately, for giving a poorer R.O.I.
Not everyone is you tho!
You have to consider that because it hasn’t happened to you, it doesn’t mean it won’t happen to others!
Have you noticed that Climate Change is making UK weather more extreme?
How can you be prepared when an emergency happens and because you weren’t aware of the emergency, you haven’t topped up the charge of your hearing aids?!
We aren’t talking about not being able to charge your Aids for weeks on end!