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Posts Tagged ‘hearing aid batteries’

An essential component of a hearing aid is the hearing aid batteries. None of the electronic parts will work without being powered by the battery. 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 smaller hearing aids that fit into the ear canal have a shorter battery life. The reason is that these are smaller batteries and don’t have as much of the power producing components.

The older, more traditional kind of hearing aids utilized mercury batteries to keep them going. But there are newer zinc batteries that are much more effective and therefore more commonly used.

Zinc batteries utilize zinc air. 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.

You’ll find that zinc hearing aid batteries have a color coded tab. One purpose for this is to be able to tell what size the battery is. But it also keeps the air out of the battery until it is time to use 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.

There are four common sizes of hearing aid batteries on the market today. Every size of hearing aid has a certain size of battery that fits it. A number 10 battery with a yellow color code is the smallest you can purchase. The blue labels indicate the largest size available, which is 675. The small sizes are most commonly used for the smaller digital hearing aids that go into the ear canal. The large sizes are used for the behind the ear hearing aids.

The larger sizes are longer lasting since there is room to hold more zinc inside the battery. However, they are a lot more bulky. Many people would rather change the battery more often and have a less noticeable hearing aid.