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What’s the Best Hearing Aid Battery?

September 30, 2009

An essential component of a hearing aid is the hearing aid batteries. Without power from the battery, the whole device is essentially useless. In fact, they’re so important that a lot of people who wear a hearing aid keep a hearing aid battery tester handy. It makes it easy to know when the battery is running low on power. Then they can be prepared with spare batteries when it needs to be replaced.

The life span of hearing aid batteries will depend on what kind of device you’re using. The batteries for those small hearing aids that go inside the ear canal don’t last as long. That’s because the batteries are smaller and contain less of the substances required to produce power.

Older styles of hearing aid batteries used mercury to power the device. These batteries are much less effective than the newer zinc batteries that are popular these days.

Something called zinc air is the secret behind zinc batteries. This is a combination of the zinc contained inside the battery along with oxygen present outside the battery. This produces a reaction that powers the battery. They have about twice the life of the conventional mercury batteries.

Zinc hearing aid batteries come with a color coded tab on them. One of the reasons for this is so you can know the size of the battery. However, it also prevents air from entering the battery until you’re ready to start using it.

As soon as the tab is pulled off, oxygen starts to enter the battery. The battery will activate once the zinc and oxygen combine. For this reason the tab should not be removed until you’re ready to use it so it doesn’t start losing power.

Most hearing aids today use one of four different sizes of batteries that are readily available. There’s a specific size of battery for every type of hearing aid out there. The smallest size is color coded with yellow and is labeled a ten. The blue labels indicate the largest size available, which is 675. Digital hearing aids that fit inside the ear canal typically use the smaller sizes. The large sizes are used for the behind the ear hearing aids. You can buy hearing aid batteries just about anywhere where they sell hearing aids online.

The bigger sizes can contain a greater amount of zinc inside them, and therefore last longer. But they do take up a lot more space. Many people would rather change the battery more often and have a less noticeable hearing aid.

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