Hearing Aid Battery Tutorial

If you are here, you are probably saying, "What is this mA Drain and Capacity stuff?", or "What the heck is this Zincaro thing and what is it doing with my mA information?"

This page explains what the acyronyms stand for and what Zincaro does to give you battery life estimates. Also included are some general information on batteries.

First, what is this mA and mAh stuff?

mA - milliamp - this is a measurement of electrical power used two ways in computing battery life.
  • The mA Drain of a hearing aid per hour. (mA) This is how much mA of electricity a hearing aid will drain in one hour. It is usually given on the ANSI specification strip or, you can measure it with most hearing aid test boxes. If either of these are not available, you should be able to call the hearing aid manufacturer for the drain information. The average values that Zincaro uses were taken from Robert L. Martin's January 1992 Nuts and Bolts article in The Hearing Journal. To his credit, Dr. Martin's article gave me the inspiration to create this page!

  • The mA hour Capacity of a battery. (mAh) This is the number of hours that a hearing aid battery gives 1 mA of electricity. The average values that Zincaro uses are from the RAYOVAC Zinc Air Extra brand of hearing aid batteries.

What Zincaro does to compute battery life is divide and then divide again!
First, he takes the mA hour Capacity of a battery and divides it by the mA Drain per hour of a hearing aid.

Zincaro's first division (capacity/drain) gives the total number of hours that the hearing aid will last on one battery. Here is an example:
    If a 675 Zinc Air battery has a mA capacity of 600 hours (a gas tank of 600 gallons) and the hearing aid has a drain rating of .5 mA per hour (consumes .5 gallons per hour) the battery should last 600/.5 or 1200 hours.
Still, 1200 hours doesn't mean much to people until you tell them how many days that equals! This is Zincaro's second division. He divides the total number of hours, by the number of hours per day that the hearing aid will be used. Day estimates are usually based on wearing the hearing aid 16 hours per day. So, to finish the example from above:
    1200 hours,
    divided by 16 hours per day,
    will give our battery life estimate
    a total of 75 days! Wow, a month and a half!

Here are some useful factoids that I use when counseling patients on hearing aid batteries.

That is it! If you have this information down click here to use Zincaro!

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