Hearing aid troubleshooting

How to change the tubing in your deaf child’s hearing aids

In this video, we’re going to show you how to replace the tubing in your child’s ear moulds. Before you start, you’ll need a supply of spare tubes, which your audiologist should have provided for you. You will also need a pair of sharp scissors. If your child has an unusual-shaped ear mould or one that is particularly difficult to read, you will probably need an ear mould threading tool, and you may need a sharp knife, such as a craft knife or a Stanley knife.

We’re going to replace the tubing once it starts to get a little bit harder, and it isn’t soft and flexible any longer. You simply pull the old piece of tubing out of the mould. Okay, keep the old piece of tubing because you’re going to need it later. Look at a new piece of tubing, and it should already have a U-bend in the tube, and this is going to help us later to get the tubing standing at the right angle in the mould.

What we’re going to do is trim one side of the tubing to cut it to a point. Sometimes, you can just thread it straight through the mould, but this one is very soft and flexible, and there’s a bit of resistance, so I’m going to thread it using a tubing threader. We’re going to push the threader through the mould from the opposite direction, then use the loop so that the tubing threader makes thread. I’ll tube through it and pull it back through the mould, and then keep pulling until your tubing stands upright, so that will be standing up towards the top of the ear and the hearing aid.

At this point, you need to get your old piece of cheering that you’ve taken out and hold it against the mould. Then you’re going to use your scissors to trim it off to the same length, and then you want to cut the tubing as close to the mould as you can get it.

This is a very hard mould; they’re hard a clinic, and it isn’t very flexible with them tubing, so if you can, and you have one, you use a craft knife or a Stanley knife to cut off the tubing as close to the mould as you can, and then he makes it back in the tubing ready to go because if the tubing is too long here and there and sits too high, it’s always better to leave it a bit longer and trim it down, so if that happens, you just take it apart and cut off a tiny bit of the If you need any more information about looking after your child’s hearing aids or replacing the tubing in your child’s ear moulds, download our guide to hearing aid information for families from our website or have a chat with your audiologist or teacher of the deaf.