Duty Cycle of Coltri Icon LSE 100?

[iain/hsm]

Seriously? Pander to you? Why would I respond to such a toxic person? How farcical to think you are sincerely concerned with anyone wishing to purchase the MCH-6 Icon. Just more grist for your slander.

You said they only came with a GP100 and of course the ICON does come with GX200. Anyone purchasing the Coltri MCH-6 Icon can ask questions of Nuvair [Ron] here in USA. The irony is that either the GP100 or the GX200, that I have, is perfectly fine for a portable, light weight compressor. Honda makes great motors.

You really do like the sound of your own voice.............

Why would you? You have already responded just with more obfuscation and bluster.

Now be a sweetheart and ask your Nuvair Ron mate to join us all and he can answer the questions on the Coltri duty cycle and the lack of a service factor on the motors data plate for the American customers.

Also while you are at it ask him why does Nuvair sell an old spec European IEC metric framed motors to the USA as opposed to the required NEMA spec for the American customers.

Also why the duty cycle 75% so low and if they are selling old spec European market EFF1 motors that are no longer allowed why didn't they sell them to a 3rd world country that doesn't have the same standards as the American NEMA requirements or the European IEC standards

Now I do understand the drive to supply the cheapest possible components to the scuba trade
and the US distributors requirement to make a large profit on each sale but suppling motors that don't meet the requirement of the country you import into is a bit of a poor position to be in.

Maybe he can enlighten us also on this Honda engine specification.

 

[diversity]

Please do not breathe any air coming out of that pump until the PMV is installed... It is not just hours on the filter, if the PMV isn't installed then there isn't enough dwell time in the stacks to adequately filter the gas, there is a reason they are put on there. Very seriously, please do not breathe any gas out of that pump until a PMV is installed, it is a critical piece of safety equipment for a breathing gas compressor

This is Great! I haven't visited my thread in 2 weeks, thinking it was not getting much response. Lots of good reading here. Since this will be my first full season with this new Coltri Icon, and it came bare bones, I've gotten around to adding an hour meter, and just recently added an 1800 psi PMV (1-10 cfm) which is perfect for a 3.5 cfm output. I guess Coltri wanted to save the $75 plus fittings. If I knew now that living few minutes away from US distributorship of Coltri is not a reason to buy from them, I would have bought it from Nuvair in California and had it shipped here to NJ. With ALL the accessories included. This machine is MANY fold better than the Cornelius I've used for decades, and don't doubt it will serve me better. However, I think I would not have hesitated to buy A bauer if they provide a higher duty cycle.

I feel I must clarify some details on the mentioned "dwell time" in the filters that the PMV allegedly creates. The PMV does not affect dwell time in the least, once the 12 or so seconds elapses after switching compressor on, closing drains, etc. to charge up the filter and condensate chambers to 1800 psi in my case. The 4th stage "outputs" 3.5 cfm, and the tanks "receive" 3.5 cfm. If air were to "dwell" in the stacks, pressure would back up to the stages and build up to read higher than what the tanks are reading during fills, tripping relief valve, etc. This could only happen with a seriously undersized filter, or clogged media. And that wouldn't go on for too many seconds without something tripping. If input rate did not equal output rate, the compressor's gauge would not read the same pressure as the gauge on the fill attachment.
It's like a garden hose...... 1 gallon in, 1 gallon out.

Oh, and if it were a "critical" piece of safety equipment, Coltri would not jeopardize their reputation by letting a piece of breathing air equipment leave the factory without it.

 

[diversity]

---

The PMV I added in my pic above came from Nuvair. About $75 plus a couple of JIC fittings. Maybe Nuvair adds them to their Coltri compressors. I have a hunch they make sure ANY brand they sell goes out the door with one, even if it is an aftermarket valve. Mine did not have one installed from the factory.

Now if you truly want more dwell time in the filter, replace the canister with one that has 4 or more times the volume so the air spends more contact time with the media before exiting. But then you will be incurring the cost of 4 or more filters at once, the very thing you are trying to minimize by building back pressure in your separator. Only increasing the media canister can increase contact/dwell time. But no matter how large the canister is, 3.5 cfm "in" is still same 3.5 cfm "out". Adding a PMV to the same canister size is same throughput as before and after installing it.

 

[Tanks A Lot]

I think you may misunderstand the concept of a PMV. I have followed the thread vaguely and was amazed that you mentioned a breathing air compressor without a PMV. At first, I chalked it up to user error and figured you may have just missed it. However, if it was truly absent, this is quite frankly disturbing from an engineering perspective.

In combination with the cyclone separators, it is the single most important piece of equipment for removing moisture from the gas. Your final filter, the one with the molecular sieve, is filtering only a tiny amount of water and oil. If you do some rough back-of-the-hand calculations, you’ll find that above 95% of the moisture and oil is removed by the cyclone separators and PMV working together, slightly more or less depending on gas temperature, rather than by the final molecular sieve filter.

This is easily demonstrated by considering how much moisture air can hold at different temperatures.
Say you’re filling in the tropics at around 30°C; you would end up with half a glass of water that must be removed from the air for every single cylinder filled. The final filter alone obviously cannot handle this. To achieve proper moisture removal, properly functioning interstage coolers, cyclone separators, and a working PMV are vital.

Without a PMV, the pressure inside your compressor system would be equal to whatever is inside your cylinder. This is terrible from a physics standpoint when it comes to moisture removal. To visualize this, think of a dishwashing sponge: when uncompressed, it holds 100% of the water it can retain. If you squeeze it to half its size, it will only hold half the moisture. Squeeze it further to a third of its original size, and it will only hold a third of the water, and so on. Air behaves similarly, though not exactly the same way. I still think it's a good analogy to visualize the phenomenon.

It is imperative that the cyclone separators operate at their designated pressures to effectively remove moisture from the gas. This can only be achieved with a properly functioning PMV, usually set to around 140 bar (check the documentation for the exact value).

Unfortunately, it is a common myth that the filter removes the majority of moisture and oil from the gas, after all, it’s called a filter. However, the real workhorses are the cyclone separators, which can only function properly with a PMV in place. Interstage coolers make their job even easier, as cooler gases can hold less moisture.

There is a great article that may interest you. It explains how this process works in much greater detail than I can do quickly here.

 

[tbone1004]

This is Great! I haven't visited my thread in 2 weeks, thinking it was not getting much response. Lots of good reading here. Since this will be my first full season with this new Coltri Icon, and it came bare bones, I've gotten around to adding an hour meter, and just recently added an 1800 psi PMV (1-10 cfm) which is perfect for a 3.5 cfm output. I guess Coltri wanted to save the $75 plus fittings. If I knew now that living few minutes away from US distributorship of Coltri is not a reason to buy from them, I would have bought it from Nuvair in California and had it shipped here to NJ. With ALL the accessories included. This machine is MANY fold better than the Cornelius I've used for decades, and don't doubt it will serve me better. However, I think I would not have hesitated to buy A bauer if they provide a higher duty cycle.

I feel I must clarify some details on the mentioned "dwell time" in the filters that the PMV allegedly creates. The PMV does not affect dwell time in the least, once the 12 or so seconds elapses after switching compressor on, closing drains, etc. to charge up the filter and condensate chambers to 1800 psi in my case. The 4th stage "outputs" 3.5 cfm, and the tanks "receive" 3.5 cfm. If air were to "dwell" in the stacks, pressure would back up to the stages and build up to read higher than what the tanks are reading during fills, tripping relief valve, etc. This could only happen with a seriously undersized filter, or clogged media. And that wouldn't go on for too many seconds without something tripping. If input rate did not equal output rate, the compressor's gauge would not read the same pressure as the gauge on the fill attachment.
It's like a garden hose...... 1 gallon in, 1 gallon out.

Oh, and if it were a "critical" piece of safety equipment, Coltri would not jeopardize their reputation by letting a piece of breathing air equipment leave the factory without it.

Please reread my post, the PMV is absolutely a critical piece of safety equipment for a breathing gas compressor and if yours did not include it I suspect it was sold as a paintball model. Please also reread the portion about PMV's as it relates to dwell time because it absolutely does drastically increase the dwell time for any filling up to the PMV pressure. Filter dwell time is a function of flow rate, volume of the filter, and the pressure that is in there. So the PMV is 1800psi which we'll say is 125 bar for fun. Without the PMV, every minute the compressor puts 3.5cf in and 3.5cf goes out. For fun let's say the tank is at 0psi and is 70cf, and the filter is 1cf for easy math *which is gargantuan but is what it is*. So with that math the tank will fill in (70/3.5)=20 + 1/3 ~20.25minutes.
If however you install that PMV which is set to 125bar, then before you get ANY gas out of the filter, the compressor has to put 1cf *125bar=125cf/3.5cfm ~36mins just to pressurize the filter, THEN it will start flowing through the filter. So that 1cf filter now holds a minimum of 125cf of gas inside of it, which is ~125x the dwell time in the filter for those first few PSI of gas going into the tank. Obviously that multiple decreases until 1800psi when the PMV becomes redundant, but until that 1800psi, you are getting significantly higher dwell time in the filters which makes the filtration more effective, and the higher pressure lets the mechanical separators do more work which makes the filters more efficient.


The "Happy Home Owner" type compressors whether from Bauer or not do not have continuous duty ratings as the cooling requirements for continuous duty would make the pump prohibitively large and heavy. The Bauer Oceanus is rated to run long enough to do what you are asking of it though. The Junior II is not, but the Oceanus is beefed up a bit to fill IIRC 2x cascade cylinders which is pretty comparable to what you're asking it to do.

Also for funsies, your Cornelius is actually true 100% duty rated. From a design and build quality perspective it is vastly superior to anything Coltri has ever made and since filtration systems are compressor agnostic, if you put a proper filtration system on there it is as robust as it gets, albeit loud and slow.

 

[tmassey]

It's like a garden hose...... 1 gallon in, 1 gallon out.

Others have harped on it, but I’m going to as well because the information is so inaccurate. This statement above is 100% incorrect.

You are making a very fundamental flaw and comparing compressible gas to incompressible liquid. You’re right in that 1 gallon of water going into a hose means 1 gallon has to come out of a hose. We’re not pumping water.

A compressor is rated in SCFM. That is standard cubic feet per minute. That is how much volume of gas is moved if the destination gas were allowed to expand to standard temperature and pressure! But the destination pressure is not standard pressure, it’s higher. That reduces the actual volume the destination gas will take. Unlike a garden hose.

The volume of the first stage cylinder is fixed, as is the pressure: it’s open to the atmosphere. That means that, within a certain small amount of variation, the first stage always contains the same number of molecules. However, as those same number of molecules move through the process, they continue to take a smaller and smaller volume. That means that, at the filter stack, the “size” of the filter stack increases as the pressure increases. It has “room” for more and more “volumes” (actually meaning the collection of fixed number of molecules that filled the original first stage volume) of the first stage because those “volumes” are packed smaller and smaller.

That’s what increases the dwell time. At atmospheric pressure the filter stack might literally only hold two or three volumes of the first stage. But at 1500 psi, or 100 times atmospheric pressure, it can now hold 200 or 300 volumes of the first stage. That means it takes 200 or 300 times longer to go through the filter stack!

And that’s why we have the PMV. Its goal is to enforce the fact that we do not want large volumes of gas leaving. We want very small volumes of densely packed molecules leaving. That forces the gas to dwell in the filter stacks longer. And yes, this achieves the exact opposite of what you said: 1 gallon of volume goes in, 1 cup of volume comes out. Like magic.

(ETA: that’s one of the reasons why we have the PMV. The other was also mentioned by others: the higher pressure squeezes the water vapor out of the gas like wringing a sponge, which allows us to mechanically separate the vast majority of the water from the gas. The PMV enforces a minimum amount of “wringing”. Without that, the gas will still contain way too much water and it will absolutely overwhelm the filter, which is designed to remove literally only a few *grams* of water. So the PMV both protects the filter, and allows it to do its job.)


You’re not going to like what I have to say next, but I think it needs to be said. The lack of caution and humility you are showing here is disturbing. You’ve got people with a great deal of knowledge telling you that the basic assumptions you are making (in multiple areas of knowledge) are wrong. And rather than questioning your assumptions and trying to figure out why they might say that, you simply tell them that they are wrong. I’m not saying that they are 100% to be believed and all of your knowledge is 100% wrong. I’m saying that you seem to be ignoring a great deal of skilled people telling you that you’re going to make a mistake. And you’re doing it with high-pressure gas that can kill you in multiple ways.

And by the way, I agree with you on the attitude of some of the people you’re dealing with. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t value in the information. And most of the people are not coming to you with attitude, just a sense of concern. Please take a moment and read what they are saying with an open mind.

 

[Wallowa]

Last few posts have been very thorough and thoughtful....thanks.

 

[grantmac]

Interesting that the object you posted is sold by Bauer, Lawrence Factor etc as a check valve with no pressure regulating capability, NOT a PMV.

Have you verified that it actually functions as a PMV?

 

[diversity]

Thanks for all the passionate input here. Was like pulling teeth to get more than 1 response when starting this thread. Really has momentum now! First of all, my Coltri came from a recreational & commercial dive shop, American Diving and Marine Supply. They don't target the paintball market. And yes, I grew to realize I got rooked with this "A la carte" compressor package. I haven't purchased from them in many years since a couple of drysuits ago buying my DUI drysuit from them, but grew to trust them a little too much apparently. To be honest, when I bought this at the end of last season, I didn't scrutinize the finer details. I assumed that most features were standard on Coltri compressors.

That is why I'm scrambling now as the season quickly approaches, to get this compressor and other gear up to speed before the first dive. I know how many weeks I have left, and what's on my list. That doesn't mean I don't take important issues seriously. I don't recall any post that mislead anyone to thinking that I didn't insist on a certain level of performance from my breathing air, or that I was confused about the purpose, functionality or importance of a PMV. In fact I take extensive steps to insure the most cool & dry air possible enters that compressor. I utilize the grand kid's air conditioned, dehumidified & insulated club house that I built them alongside my barn to "pre-treat" the air that I remotely draw from (pics below). I think I would know whether or not there was a PMV installed. You can see the tubing come directly off of the 4th stage, through a poor excuse of an aftercooler coil, into the condensate trap which is no bigger than large tubing itself (exageration, but not far from it).

With the PMV now installed, it takes a mere 20 seconds to charge up to 1800 before air exits the valve at 3.5 cfm, and 1800 psi (on high side) and 0 psi on low side to start if on empty tank. But still 3.5 cfm into and out of valve. Into and out of tiny stacks. But now instead of waiting 18 minutes for a HP 120 to fill to 1800 (52% of a fill), and 15 minutes for my hp 100's, I look forward to extracting considerably more moisture prior to the molecular sieve. My first cartridge I expected to scrap for initial break-in, testing, etc., but made sure I'm ready before changing media.

My tanks fill linearly, I've timed 0-low, low to mid, mid to high, etc. No appreciable slowing of the rpm, and 3.5 cfm output over any span at any range. So I see what perspective some of you are coming from with dwell time, but I was basing my perspective on the PMV being equalized on both sides of the valve. That "is" an appreciable amount of time to benefit from efficient moisture separation. I appreciate those who took a gentleman's approach to sharing their perspective.

 

[iain/hsm]

If I knew now that living few minutes away from US distributorship of Coltri is not a reason to buy from them, I would NOT have bought it (snip Iain)

There I fixed it for you.

Just for background you understand below highlighted is an extract from the web site of the USA distributor of Coltri Coltri Americas.

Coltri Americas is the new Americas division of Coltrisub, Italy. Coltri Americas will be the key supplier to the Coltrisub distribution network for the Americas and Caribbean.
Coltrisub is known as a world leader in the development of air compressors, high quality scuba
equipment and nitrox delivery systems . Coltrisub is known for delivering turnkey nitrox
(nitrogen/oxygen) systems for recreational diving. The new office....... (end Quote)

The reason now is such a good time to buy a Coltri at a great deal price some suggest is illustrated below.
Photos from inside the US distributors factory some scuba cylinders left and a couple of small compressors be quick going fast as the landlord just sold the property 24th January 2025. But don't worry about spares and service we are all here for you Coltri guys. Flowers and sympathy and a shoulder to cry on. Elvis has left the building. ( More on the other two American distributors of Coltri later)