Regulators and Nitrox

[sharpenu]

Yooper,
To have a fire, you are correct in that you need heat, fuel and an oxidizer to have a fire. But, in the case of oil and oxygen, heat is generated when oil is exposed to oxygen. Oil products have the ability to produce heat without fire. Even the oil on your skin is sufficient to be explosive in the proper O2 atmosphere. That is why a pile of oily rags will catch fire "spontaneously". Anyone who doesn't O2 clean when using high % O2 is playing the odds.

Heat can also be supplied when you open the tank valve. An oil contaminated reg, with high % O2, will generate heat from the compression of the gas in the regulator itself when the pressure in the first stage goes from 1 bar to over 200 bar in a second or so.

 

[Heads Up]

Just realised neither my Safety sausage OR snorkel have been O2 cleaned!

Warhammer - What I was trying to find out is whether Apeks UK is STILL owned & run by Apeks and whether the US side of their distribution has been bought out (would explain the difference in advice perhaps?)

As far as the UK website is concerned - that is still current and as far as the staff who man it are concerned, they still work for Apeks in Blackburn, Lancashire!

 

[Lost Yooper]

I don't necessarily disagree with you, Sharpenu. The arguement of significance comes in, and the real life practical evidence which isn't there. People have been dealing with O2 for along time -- long before people got anal about cleaning everything. My contention is that there is more practical evidence that O2 cleaning is bogus than otherwise. I know of hundreds of people who have been filling pure O2 for nitrox and trimix and never cleaning or filtering anything -- ever. We're talking about thousands of fills here over a course of untold years without incident -- zero. These guys aren't a shop and don't have insurance companies to answer to either.

It will never hurt to O2 clean your stuff, and I'm not necessarily against it. My point is that there is no reason to get rediculas about it, and that there are lot more reasons influencing the industry standard than practical danger.

Mike

 

[roakey]

And don't forget you should always use an O2 compatible mouthwash if you eat anything greasy before a dive where you're going to deompress on 100% O2!

Roak

 

[buff]

I seem to remeber a chemistry experiment that involved the combustion of titanium or titanium oxide strips-more like an explosion.

You would not believe the number of patients who SMOKE while on home O2!!!!!!!

If the US Navy doesn't get too bent out of shape with regards to "O2 cleaning" then I wouldn't.

I'll ask Rainreg. about this topic.

As usual, lots of opinions and observations that are interpreted as fact and then become standard personal practice......

 

[SDAnderson]

So what does making a system "nitrox ready" actually mean? Is there anything more to it than removing low flash-point materials such as hydrocarbons (lubricants) and plastics (O-rings) and metals (titanium) from the system? If there isn't a major cost associated with this process (my LDS did it to a tank in for it's annual and only charged me a few dollars) why would anyone diving nitrox not take this precaution? It appears that there is very little risk at 40% of self-ignition, but what about at 100%. How much difference is there between the self-ignition point and the flash-point at varying % of O2? What about the effect of pressure (ATA) on the flash-point and self-ignition point?

I do find it interesting that there is virtually no "real world" evidence of a problem - there are a lot of 80/20 tanks getting banged around out there, one would think that there would be more of them blowing up if there is a serious need for oxy clean systems.

Steven

 

[sharpenu]

I know this isn't for scuba regulators, but I had this link and I thought you would like to read it. Maybe it can shed some light on the subject:

http://www.fda.gov/cdrh/oxyreg.html

 

[roakey]

Originally posted by buff
I'll ask Rainreg. about this topic.

If you ask rainreg don't forget to follow the money to find out what drives his reponse (rainreg to D.E.T.A.).

Roak

 

[Warhammer]

Originally posted by Heads Up
Just realised neither my Safety sausage OR snorkel have been O2 cleaned!

Warhammer - What I was trying to find out is whether Apeks UK is STILL owned & run by Apeks and whether the US side of their distribution has been bought out (would explain the difference in advice perhaps?)

As far as the UK website is concerned - that is still current and as far as the staff who man it are concerned, they still work for Apeks in Blackburn, Lancashire!

See, that's what's so funny about this issue as it pertains to Apeks regulators. Up until a year or so ago, Apeks owned and operated Apeks. Their policy was that any of their standard regs were nitrox compatible, with the exception of 1 or two of the older models (I forget which ones those were). At that time Zeagle distributed Apeks regulators here in the US, and their policy was also that any of the regs were nitrox compatible. Then along came Aqua-Lung. Aqua-Lung, the largest scuba equipment manufactor in the world, bought Apeks. Shortly after the buy out, Apeks's policy on nitrox changed to what i posted above. Same regulators, just a different policy. Zeagle lost the Apeks distributership and Seaquest, a subsidiary of Aqua-Lung, now distributes the line of regs here in the US.

As far as the Apeks UK goes, I'm not certain. But I was under the impression that Aqua-Lung bought the company not just the US distributing rights. While they didn't change the names or anything, I'm pretty sure they do control all of Apeks, including the plant in Blackburn. As far as the link on the website goes, that's new to me. Last time i checked the website, they had the policy posted on the website as it is in my manual. I don't know the reason for the change now, but they have supposidly starting using a new type of O-ring in their regulators, maybe that's why they changed it.

Myself, I agree with Lost Yooper, it's more BS than anything else. And like him, I don't have a problem with 02 cleaning, I keep my nitrox tanks cleaned, but I'm not about to reclean my regs everytime I use them with air. Nor am I going to dedicate a reg to nothing but nitrox, when I never use anything above 40%. If I were using mixes in excess of 40% it would be different. What i don't understand about this new 23% trend is why just the regs and not the BCs, drysuits, and etc?

 

[Warhammer]

Originally posted by buff

I'll ask Rainreg. about this topic.

I believe Rainreg is the source behind what Blacknet has already posted on the issue.