Filling Air into a "Nitrox" Tank ILLEGAL?

[drbill]

Interesting responses (at least the few pages I've read). Neither fill station here on Catalina will fill tanks labeled Nitrox with air. I don't know about the legal issues, but this is their shop fill policy.

Of course I hope no one ever fills my air tank with "death gas." Most standard Nitrox blends (> 30%) would probably kill me.

 

[Azotino]

Interesting responses (at least the few pages I've read). Neither fill station here on Catalina will fill tanks labeled Nitrox with air. I don't know about the legal issues, but this is their shop fill policy.

Of course I hope no one ever fills my air tank with "death gas." Most standard Nitrox blends (> 30%) would probably kill me.

Isn't a legal issue...safety first, they talking for safety in Scuba diving and after they complain about a refill.

You can refill a tank dedicated to NITROX with air ,but you are going to use the same "Hyper" clean air used for the NITROX.

Or you can to refill with normal air, but your are going to take off the sticker(is better if the employee do it), in this way next time, if you want to use NITROX you are going to clean the tanks.

 

[drbill]

I checked with my LDS (Scuba Luv) here on Catalina. They will fill a Nitrox stickered tank with air IF it comes from the Nitrox blending station (which uses hyperfiltered air). To do so requires that someone is present in the shop with the proper training to use the system.

 

[Charlie99]

I checked with my LDS (Scuba Luv) here on Catalina. They will fill a Nitrox stickered tank with air IF it comes from the Nitrox blending station (which uses hyperfiltered air).

Now here's a trickier question. How about a tank that has a nitrox sticker, but does NOT have an O2 clean sticker? Will they fill that with regular old air that hasn't been hyperfiltered.

In some areas people can get nitrox fills in non-O2 clean tanks, from membrane systems or prebanked nitrox. There shouldn't be any problem getting regular grade E air fills for those tanks.

 

[Dan Gibson]

Closing an isolator certainly calls into question the fill operator's knowledge.

if you think that guy it was a fillmonkey ......what are you?????
Think about the reasons...if you leave the sticker on it.
What I know I don't want to refill any O²dedicates tanks contaminated with any hydrocarbons and etc :furious::furious::furious::furious::furious:

 

[Northeastwrecks]

A person who actually has clue what they are doing will look at the content label to determine what is in the tank. The O2 clean sticker identifies the tank as being suitable for O2 service. The nitrox bumper sticker is merely intended to keep people from accidentally grabbing a tank that they shouldn't use. Since we're talking about doubles, that doesn't seem particularly likely.

What is by far the most troubling aspect of this issue is that the fill idiot (he doesn't deserve the lofty title of fill monkey) shut off the isolator. The worst case involves an OOG situation. Its much more likely that the diver would end up on a boat, or at a dive site, when they discover that they got a bad fill and that they have half the gas that they should have received.

Whether the shop fills nitrox is not relevant. If they can pump hyperfiltered air, then they should have filled both tanks. If they can't, then removing the O2 clean sticker after checking with the diver would be appropriate. But to fill only one of the cylinders is absolute, unmitigated idiocy. Its also ineffective, since the diver would, hopefully, have opened the isolator when they found that (i) their primary wasn't working; or (ii) their SPG read zero.

There's no question that the shop in question should be avoided until they get their act together.