What’s the Best Hearing Aid Battery?
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 will know to have other batteries on hand to replace it.
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.
Zinc batteries utilize zinc air. This is a mixture of oxygen in the air along with the zinc present inside the battery. The resulting reaction gives power to the battery. They last approximately twice as long as the old 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.
Once the tab is removed, the oxygen in the air is allowed into 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. Every size of hearing aid has a certain size of battery that fits it. The smallest size is color coded with yellow and is labeled a ten. 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. 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.
