I will say, the cheaper rechargeables aren’t doing much to help their own cause. The first OTC pair I tried used a case that was basically a clone of the Phonak Combi. It was absurdly large! That would have been ok if it had a built-in battery to store additional charges, but it didn’t. It was just stupidly big for no obvious reason.
I didn’t always want to put them in first thing in the morning, because I don’t need them for my morning routine and commute. So I had two options: 1) take them out of the giant case, put them in a smaller case and put it in my bag, or 2) unplug the charger case and toss the whole thing into my bag. By default, they turned on when removed from the case, and there was no way to change that. So I often forgot to turn them off while moving them to a smaller case, and realized midway through the day that they’d been on for several hours already.
But the real kicker was 2). When they’re in the charger case, and the charger case gets disconnected from a power source, that registered the same as the aids being removed from the case (probably because it’s just monitoring whether the aids themselves are connected to a power source). Whenever I unplugged the case, they’d automatically turn on in the case! That was bad enough when I tried to take them to work, but at least then I’d notice before they ran out of juice. But if I unplugged the charger so that I could plug something else in at home, knowing that the aids were already fully charged, they were often dead by the time I went to take them out the next day. And if the cord accidentally got unplugged because someone tripped over it… you get the idea.
If I’d kept them, I guess I’d have bought an extra charger to keep at work, but the whole set-up was just ridiculous. My current aids have a much smaller case, just a bit bigger than airpods, and I was able to deactivate the auto-on feature. That’s made things much easier.
