What am I missing?

I've been on cpap for a month now. I have been very compliant (I've been non-compliant for about 4 hours for the entire month) and now seem to sleep through the night. I have an Elite S8 II, and started with a fexifit407. I had a pretty good start, but had to trade in the 407 because it was creating a sore on my nose. I got a Mirage Micro in trade and also bought a Mirage Activa LT. Things went pretty well, I would sleep most of the night with a little bit of fussing with the masks. I'm a pretty heavy side sleeper. My leak rates were normally .2 or less with AI of around .8 or .9. Great so far. Then I noticed when I was a couple of weeks in that my EPr was turned off (my pressure was 8cm). The doctor had written EPR into the prescription and they were supposed to have turned it on. I got it turned on (of course they set at 2 and forgot to give me access to the level). My AI seemed to start heading up over one and I had one night above 2. Then I had a scheduled follow up with the Doc who put my pressure up to 9 and I got access to the EPR level setting. I also bought a Swift LT. Since then my AI seems to be significantly higher. I had one decent night with the Swift, with a leak rate between .1 and .2. I tried one size bigger pillows (m to l) and leaked more ( I think I also had it strapped too tight). My AI was close to one. I tried the Micro for a couple of nights, had typical results, except for 1.8 and 2.3 AI. Last night I readjusted the swift and man what comfort on my face. I had a leak rate of .08, but my AI was 3.4. Overall AHI is over ten, it was only 15 at my sleep study. I don't worry so much about hypopneas, especially on the resmed. But I am somewhat concerned about the apneas. I feel kind of draggy this morning. What am I missing? Does anyone have some suggestions?

Now that you have a comfortable mask that doesn't leak much, why don't you try turning off the EPR and lowering your pressure back down to what you had before? An EPR setting of 2 is the reason your doctor upped your pressure. Not everyone does better with EPR on. You seem to have done better before it was turned on. It's worth a try, anyway.

Bev

It's quite possible that like a lot of us, you unknowingly sleep with your mouth open, losing all the pumped in air that way, and so you might want to investigate either a full face mask (like the Ultramirage, or Quattro, etc.), or else at least first have a trial of taping your mouth for a few days to see if that changes things. There are various kinds of tape that are good (and some that aren't) but I don't have the links at the moment to the posts on taping, but try the search engine to see what comes up.