YAFS (Yet Another Fill Station)

[Uncle Pug]

Enjoy you new found freedom

three notes:

Since your Hyperfilter is a stand alone unit you can take it with you on remote trips where nitrox is unavailable to a)keep your tanks clean b)blend your own EAN by taking along an O2 supply cylinder.

You wouldn't need to run the enriched air through your hyperfilter if you end up going with continuous blending in the future... you would eliminate the hyperfilter.

You are right about O2 enhanced fires! But as long as you keep things clean and go slow with the fill you shouldn't have to worry about it... just think of all the folks using O2 inside their homes for medical reasons (I remember visiting a COPD patient who was sitting there in her overstuffed chair sucking on a cigarette while wearing a nasal cannula. )

 

[Cave Diver]

Uncle Pug once bubbled...
just think of all the folks using O2 inside their homes for medical reasons (I remember visiting a COPD patient who was sitting there in her overstuffed chair sucking on a cigarette while wearing a nasal cannula. )

I knew somebody like that. The could barely breathe on their own when walking around, had to do breathing treatments several times a day, including pure 02, yet continued to smoke!

Made me just want to smack em sometimes!

They finally gave up smoking. Unfortunately, they gave up breathing first.

 

[Genesis]

The LF Hyperfilter setup is quite the trick. The only problem with it (if you can call it that) is that it is flow-restricted, which means that if someone tries to slam a fill through it they'll get a surprise! I LIKE that on the other hand, in that if I DO take it with me somewhere I won't be getting any fast fills - it holds the rate to 6cfm. The average "fill monkey" would go NUTS trying to fill me through one though - no 2 minute fills with that puppy inline.

I'm just not comfortable with continuous blending yet... although I do know its all the rage. One of the shops here does it exclusively. After I have some hours on the compressor, and am comfortable with it being fully broken in and any manufacturing oils and residues are out of it, I might consider it - particularly if I start ending up with a lot of partial tanks of gas.

I gave this a LOT of thought, because that hyperfilter wasn't cheap! Neither are the cartridges. But the added safety it affords is, for me anyway, worth it - in that even if I was to have a "punch through" or other malfunction of the primary stack, I'd still probably have ok-quality air coming out the other end. If I was going to buy a second filter stack ANYWAY for redundancy or extra filtration, the difference in cost between that and the HF was only a couple hundred bucks, most of that for the hardware contained in it (priority valve, micron filter, two check valves, the base plate, bleed, pressure gauge, etc.)

Since I'm the one actually breathing what comes out the business end its not a matter of "liability insurance" concerns - its just a bit more important than that in this case...

On the smoking and O2, I have a friend who's husband passed from cancer a few years ago. She has told me that when she'd be with him in the hospital, and they'd go outside for some fresh air, she'd see guys dragging around chemo pumps with them at the hospital with a cig stuck in their mouth! Yikes! I also have seen folks that are on membrane-separator-style O2 enrichment through a cannula due to COPD - smoking.

Go figure.

 

[Uncle Pug]

Genesis once bubbled...
if I start ending up with a lot of partial tanks of gas.

...you will... unless you are sucking them down to nothing each dive. One of the big benefits of pumping your own is conserving the remaining... look at it as money in the bank.

Now if you have a good blending program (or a smart brain) you can adjust for the remaining contents without resorting to dumping... a little more involve with Tx but no sweat with EAN.

Or...

You could PP blend into a bank with your present set up and then just top off the dive tanks from your bank.

I bank EAN 32 and only run the compressor when the bank needs topping... or I'm blending Tx.

 

[Genesis]

The problem with PP blending into a bank is that the O2 cylinders are 2015 PSI when full, which is WAY below a usable tank pressure.

This is ok when you start, but the problem comes about when the bank is below desired fill pressure (but not dead!) and you want to fill something.

There are ways around that; the easiest is probably to set up the bank with 40%, and then "cut" it with straight air as a top-off fill...

Without a Haskel its pretty easy to end up with a bank at 2000 psi, which is a pretty useless pressure, no way to put more O2 into it, and no good way to get the rest of the gas out of it. The problem becomes more acute when your supply tank gets lower.

With PP blending single tanks at least you're not wasting MUCH gas, and with a two-tank cascade of O2 you can get to the point where you're sending the "empties" back at ~200 psi.

The problem with "topping off" partials is not the computation - that's simple - it comes about when your supply tank is low! The only "fix" for that is to have a cascade....

The second O2 tank lease is cheaper than the bank storage

 

[Uncle Pug]

Genesis once bubbled...
The problem with "topping off" partials is not the computation - that's simple - it comes about when your supply tank is low! The only "fix" for that is to have a cascade.

continuous blending shines in this regard.

 

[Genesis]

But then we're back to the risk:benefit computation again

 

[Stone]

Who did you decide to get your O2 from?

 

[Genesis]

Got set up on an account, went over there, picked up the K and loaded it up. No problem at all.

Just waiting on the nut and nipple for the O2 whip - everything else is done and working; I filled an air tank last night to test it all, and the system worked great.....

No more paying for fills here

 

[Spearchucker]

How much additional work would it be to add some banks? What about something automatic to drain off the condensate? This is my problem: I need the ability to fill 10 or 12 tanks in one evening. They are all high pressure 120's, and I don't really want to wait 1/2 hour per tank. I think I could do the smaller compressor, have four or five bank bottles, and go from there. If I knew how long the compressor would have to run to fill the banks, I could put a timer on it and just let it rip.