Every June we get the same call. A patient is two hours into a hike on the Blue Ridge Parkway, comes back to the car, and one of their hearing aids has gone quiet. Sometimes it’s wax. Most of the time, in our climate, it’s moisture. Western North Carolina summers are beautiful and brutally humid, and your hearing aids are tiny computers riding around inside your ears all day. They feel every bit of it.
This is the guide we wish every patient had taped inside their kitchen cabinet by Memorial Day. The good news — a few simple habits get you through the season without a single panicked Friday-afternoon call to the office.
Humidity is the real enemy — not water
WNC summer humidity routinely sits between 70 and 90 percent. That moisture finds its way into the microphone ports, the receiver, the battery contacts, and the seam where the dome meets the wire. You don’t have to fall in the lake to ruin a hearing aid in July. You just have to sweat through a yard-work afternoon and toss the devices into a nightstand drawer.
Most modern hearing aids carry an IP68 rating, which sounds bulletproof but really means “resistant to dust and brief water exposure.” That is NOT a waterproof rating for swimming, showering, or sitting in a humid case overnight. The seals are good. They are not perfect. Every time moisture sneaks past them, you shorten the life of the receiver — the most expensive component to replace.
The fix is dead simple — dry your devices every single night. We’ll get to how in a minute.
Sweat, sunscreen, and bug spray — the WNC summer trio
Sweat is the worst kind of moisture for hearing aids because it carries salt and skin oil. Both corrode the metal contacts inside the battery door and gunk up the microphone screens. After a morning hike or a long round at the golf course, wipe your devices down with a dry microfiber cloth before you do anything else. Not a tissue, not your shirt — both leave lint. A clean, dry cloth.
Sunscreen and bug spray cause a separate problem. The aerosols and oils coat the microphone screens, which slowly muffles the sound. We see this every August — a patient swears the hearing aid is “going bad,” and what’s really going bad is a fine layer of DEET and SPF 50 baked onto the mic ports.
Spray sunscreen and bug spray BEFORE you put the hearing aids in. If you reapply during the day, take the aids out, spray, let it dry, then put them back in. Two extra minutes, years of extra life out of the microphones.
Your nightly drying routine — five minutes, every day
This is the single most important habit for summer. Build it into your bedtime the same way you brush your teeth.
Open the battery door if you wear traditional zinc-air batteries. That lets air circulate through the device overnight. If you wear rechargeable lithium aids, set them in the charger as usual — but if the charger doesn’t have an active drying feature (most don’t), add an extra step.
Put your hearing aids in a drying container. The cheap version is a small jar with desiccant beads from any pharmacy. The better version is an electric dehumidifier designed for hearing aids — usually $50 to $120, runs for a few hours, kills bacteria with a low UV light, and pulls humidity out of the deep crevices a desiccant jar can’t reach. We carry them at the office and we’ll honestly tell you which model fits your devices.
If you’re choosing between the two and you live anywhere from Asheville to Hendersonville to Black Mountain to Brevard, get the electric one. The humidity here earns it.
Storms, lakes, and the times you SHOULD take them out
A lot of patients ask us when to remove hearing aids during summer activities. Here’s the short list:
- Swimming, including lake and pool — always remove. IP68 is not swim-rated, and lakes are harder on a device than tap water because of silt and organic matter.
- Showering — always remove. The heat plus steam is worse for the electronics than the spray itself.
- Heavy yard work in 90-degree heat — remove if you’ll be drenched in sweat for hours. Wear them for shorter chores, take them out for the marathon ones.
- Sudden thunderstorms — most modern aids will survive getting caught in a porch dash. Wipe them down the second you’re inside, then put them in the dehumidifier for an hour.
- Hiking, biking, walking, mowing in normal conditions — keep them in. You want to hear traffic, wildlife, and people on the trail.
For everything else, use the common-sense test — if your shirt is going to be soaked through, your hearing aids will be too.
Battery and charging changes you’ll notice in summer
Zinc-air batteries (sizes 10, 13, 312, 675) react to humidity. You may notice your batteries lasting a day or two less in July than they did in March. That’s normal — the air-activated chemistry is sensitive to ambient moisture. Don’t store backup packs in the bathroom or in a hot car. A kitchen drawer is fine. The original blister pack keeps them sealed until you peel the sticker.
Rechargeable lithium devices don’t have the same humidity sensitivity, but heat is hard on the battery. Don’t leave your charging case sitting in a car in 95-degree sun all afternoon. The internal temperature inside a closed car in Asheville parking lots regularly tops 140 degrees in July, and that will quietly degrade your battery’s lifespan over a few seasons.
If your aids are losing a noticeable amount of runtime in summer and you’re not sure whether it’s the batteries, the device, or your usage pattern — that’s the call to make.
When to bring them in mid-season
You don’t have to wait for an annual check-up. If any of these happen in the middle of summer, give us a call:
- A device suddenly sounds weaker or muffled and a wax filter change doesn’t fix it
- One side cuts in and out — often a moisture issue we can resolve same-day with deeper drying
- You see visible corrosion (green or white powder) around the battery contacts
- The dome or wax filter looks discolored or won’t come off cleanly
- A device gets fully submerged — bring it in the same day, don’t wait
Most summer issues are five-minute fixes if you catch them early and ten-day repairs if you don’t.
Come Experience Hearing for yourself
If your hearing aids are giving you trouble this summer — or you’ve been putting off getting them checked because life has been busy — come see us. We work with every major manufacturer, we know what WNC humidity does to every model on the market, and we’ll spend the time to actually figure out what’s going on. No rushed appointments.
You can read the full living-with-hearing-aids guide for the bigger picture, or just call.
Come Experience Hearing for yourself — call (828) 274-6913 to schedule at our Asheville or Hendersonville office. We’ll take care of you.