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Hearing Aids, Moisture, and Redux Drying!

Hi, I’m Dr. Egan from Now Hear This, and today I’m going to talk to you about our newest equipment, our hearing aid ReDux dryer system.

One of the biggest enemies of hearing aids is moisture. All hearing aids experience moisture in the ear canal, but especially in North Carolina, we face even more. Even if we aren’t avid walkers, gardeners, or outdoors people. Just sitting outside, our hearing aids are exposed to humidity, and our new industrial ReDux hearing dryer removes full microliters of moisture and can bring a hearing aid from dead to life again. We added this ReDux system to our clinic in June of this past year to our clinic and so far it has been an amazing lifesaver for our patients and their hearing aids. So far, it has saved multiple sets of hearing aids from having to go out for repair, because it was able to remove all the moisture itself.

Not a lot of people know this, but 98% of hearing aids contain at least some degree of harmful moisture that can corrode the hearing aid device over time. Removing this water along the way, or if something dramatic happens can make a huge difference. So, at our routine hearing aid cleaning appointments, we have been running the hearing aids in this, and that way, the hearing aid is dry, and we are good to go for another 6 months.

Now, let me tell you a little bit about how the ReDux system removes all that moisture. First, the ReDux system pulls a vacuum on the device to reduce the evaporation point of water, and then the liquid turns to gas, and it’s pulled out of the hearing itself. A valve is opened to introduce fresh air into the drying chamber and that pushes the vapor outside the system across the humidity sensor. This process repeats itself over and over until the humidity sensor confirms all moisture is removed from the hearing aids. The process then stops, and the amount of moisture removed is displayed on the screen.

So, before I made this video, I took my air pod, because I don’t have hearing loss, I don’t wear hearing aids, and I placed it in the ReDux system. And you can see here that it removed 0.6 microliters of water from my Air pod, which makes sense, I wear them at the gym, I wear them on walks with my dog, and so, 0.6 is a significant amount of water reduction from my Air pod. Anything over 0.5 can improve the functionality of the circuitry by up to 75%. So even though I don’t have hearing aids, I’m happy to use this equipment on my Air pods throughout the year as well.

If you have issues with your hearing aids or have knowingly exposed them to water, please, please bring them in so that we can remove that moisture as soon as possible, and also know that this is a new service that we are able to provide to all our established patients. So, we’re really happy that we invested in it, and we are even happier to see that it’s making a huge difference on a daily basis.

I hope you learned something from this video today, and if you like our videos or want to keep up to date on other audiology and hearing aid news, feel free to like and subscribe to our videos! Of course, I hope you learned something, and have a wonderful rest of your day!