If you have difficulty with your hearing, a hearing aid can completely change your life. Hearing aids make it easier to hear speech, environmental sounds and the TV, so once you get used to wearing one, it's difficult to cope without it.
Although hearing aids are generally reliable enough that you don't need to worry, they do have one weakness: batteries. A hearing aid battery can sometimes run out suddenly, leaving you unable to use your device and causing you a lot of difficulties if you don't have a spare. If you change your battery before it runs out, you can keep your hearing aid working fully when you need it, so look out for the following signs.
Impaired performance
The most obvious sign of a weak hearing aid battery is not necessarily one you'll always notice. You might be in the habit of frequently adjusting the volume in different environments, so you don't realise when you're putting it up higher than normal.
Try to pay attention to your normal hearing aid volume levels, and you're more likely to spot when you're turning it up higher to compensate for low battery level.
Distorted sound
In a lot of cases, it's not the volume of the hearing aid that suffers, but its sound quality. If things sound distorted or suddenly seem unclear despite being loud enough, it could be because your battery is about to run out.
Beeping noises
Some hearing aids have a built-in low battery warning, which emits a beeping sound when you need to put in a new one.
If you're not used to hearing it, however, you may not realise why it's happening. Some people mistake it for feedback and don't realise it's a simple case of needing a battery change.
Intermittent cutting out
If your hearing aid keeps cutting out, making you miss parts of conversations or other sounds, it could be because it's faulty.
Before you take it to be checked out, however, try putting in a new battery. When the battery is low, it can cause this problem because the hearing aid is struggling to get enough power.
High-pitched feedback
Feedback, which creates a high-pitched whistling sound, is one of the most common hearing aid issues. Usually, it's because of a poor fit, a blockage in the tubes or an electronic fault.
Some hearing aids have feedback cancellation built in, which, when the battery is low, fails to function, so you'll begin to hear a high-pitched sound you don't normally get.
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