S9 Autoset: "Settings Reset to Default Values. Please Contact Service Provider."

[Slartybartfast]

Just returned to my elderly Mom's house for Thanksgiving. It was a 19 hour drive from the Seattle area. Left at 0300 this morning. Just arrived. Was looking forward to a good night's sleep. Plugged in my S9 Autoset which I bought in 2009 and got the above message. The unit appears to be bricked. Totally unresponsive except for the message. It's not the memory card. I checked.

It occurs to me that perhaps there is a battery inside to keep the settings alive. Like in most computers. The message says the settings were set to default. Which is what would happen if the settings were stored in RAM. Anyone know if that might be the case?

Looks like I'm in for a rough couple of nights until I can get a new machine. IF I can get a new machine. This is scary. I haven't slept a single night without CPAP since I got this machine 11 years ago.

[ChicagoGranny]

Totally unresponsive except for the message.

I assume this means none of the buttons are working. It's a longshot, but you might try unplugging the unit, letting it sit for a few minutes, and trying again.

Mom's house

Where are you? There may be a member nearby who can help. You might call a local DME about a loaner.

Check craigslist.com. There could be a cheap one for purchase that would serve you well temporarily or even longer term.

[Pugsy]

Something happened inside the machine during transit.
If it won't let you reset the settings then it is of course serious and I don't know of any rapid fix. If it won't take your attempts to set the machine to your old machine...it died. It is likely fixable at a service center but will end up costing more than it is worth.

Check your local craigslist to see if maybe someone local has a machine you can use.
If nothing available...Call up secondwindcpap.com and ask to speak to the owner and explain the situation. They sometimes waived the RX requirement when someone has been on cpap for a long time and already know the ropes.

If you have ever bought a mask from cpap.com they should have a RX on file that would enable you to buy a machine from them.

You can of course check with your local DME if you are using one and see what they can do.

Both cpap.com and secondwindcpap.com do offer next day delivery...it's expensive but available.

Tell us where you are at....never know but there might be a forum member near where you live that can loan you their spare machine until you can get a new machine.

[Slartybartfast]

Thanks, all. I ordered a new machine from CPAP.Com and it should be here Friday. Only have to get through two nights without it. Last night was rough. Can't believe I went through that EVERY night for so long. But I found a position I can sleep in that's not too bad. Left side with chin elevated seems to work the best.

I'll start looking around for a backup machine to keep here.

Happy Thanksgiving to all.

[Wulfman...]

Just returned to my elderly Mom's house for Thanksgiving. It was a 19 hour drive from the Seattle area. Left at 0300 this morning. Just arrived. Was looking forward to a good night's sleep. Plugged in my S9 Autoset which I bought in 2009 and got the above message. The unit appears to be bricked. Totally unresponsive except for the message. It's not the memory card. I checked.

It occurs to me that perhaps there is a battery inside to keep the settings alive. Like in most computers. The message says the settings were set to default. Which is what would happen if the settings were stored in RAM. Anyone know if that might be the case?

Looks like I'm in for a rough couple of nights until I can get a new machine. IF I can get a new machine. This is scary. I haven't slept a single night without CPAP since I got this machine 11 years ago.

Yeah.......WHERE ARE YOU???


Den

.

[Slartybartfast]

Laguna Beach, CA. Just received my DreamStation from our sponsor, CPAP.com. Then clicked on the e-mail that had been bugging me for a couple of weeks and found that I could have saved 20% on the DreamStation that I bought. Crap! Just received it this afternoon. It's none too soon. My overnight study 11 years ago said I had 73.4 events/hour, with oxygen desaturations down to 63%. Shee-it! In the meantime, I sucessfully retired from Science and moved to an island in Puget Sound where real trees, not the plastic ones that are erected* to shield from view cell-phone towers grow. Howsomever my 91 year old Mum still lives here, so I have to visit her about 1/2 the time. My wife is very understanding. (Mebbe she's glad to be rid of me!) However, that means that I need to keep 2 CPAP machines operable. When I arrived here after a 19 hour non-stop ('cept for pee-stops) drive, which I do straight through (wife says I'm certifiable crazy), I got here, unpacked, and looked forward to strapping on my S9 Autoset mask and falling asleep to the soft dove-call that is characteristic of that machine. However, I got the message I alluded to. Schitt! I looked at the alternatives on Craigslist and decided to order a DreamStation from our sponsor. A.S.A.P. Spent two nights in a horrible half-sleep state, awake most of the time as my throat tried to strangle me. Awoke this morning with a horrible sore throat I got from snoring mightily. FedEx arrived this afternoon with my DreamStation. I'm actually looking forward to sleeping tonight. I set it up and it appears to work great. I have a spare S9Autoset up North.

To show y'alls what the availability of a CPAP machine means to this Damn Yankee (are Californians Yankees? California wasn't part of the Union until . . . ) I immediately ordered a second machine from our sponsor, to keep as a backup. Sleeping even one night without CPAP just isn't worth it. I'm happy to pay for a machine I might never use.

Every once in a while I hear from someone who is complaining of having to wear a CPAP mask. Believe you me! I give it to him with both barrels!

Sleep well!


*Heh! It's funny! Here in Kalifornia, which is a great place to work, and after you retire, an equally great place to be FROM, the only trees that seem to grow wild are Eucalyptus. Yet, you'll see every once in a while a fir or a spruce. Looking carefully, you'll see it's a phony tree, housing cellular communication paraphernalia.

[ChicagoGranny]

I'm happy to pay for a machine I might never use.

Many of us agree!

It's a good idea to use the backup machine occasionally. I pull mine out infrequently to use during an after-lunch nap on the rec room sofa. Some users alternate every three months.

[Slartybartfast]

Today my backup machine arrived. I now have two DreamStation Autos with Humidificator and heated hoses. Both from our sponsors at CPAP.com.

I spent three nights in friggin' agony propped up in bed trying not to choke on my throat while waiting, over a Thanksgiving that wasn't one, for expedited shipping to get me the machine. Its backup arrived today. I never want to be without a machine again. It's not worth it.

I took apart the S9 Autoset. It was amazingly clean inside. No dust, no spiderwebs, looked like new. I found on the bottom of the circuit board a CR2032 lithium battery to keep the settings alive in memory while the machine is powered off. I replaced it with a fresh battery, then checked the voltage of the old one. It was still 3.10 volts, after 10 years. That's kind of amazing. So a dead ram battery wasn't the problem.

I've been thinking that maybe I should just walk away from this one. I really liked the S9 Autoset. I don't know how many hours it had on it, but I used it every night I lived here raising my kids for over 10 years. And it controlled my OSA, yielding 0.1/hr, frequently less. My sleep doc lost interest in me and said I'm fine, but check in when I need a new machine or supplies. He sells both. But, while he's a great doc., he's got a thing against APAP machines. I always brought him a weeks-worth of ResScan reports, showing him how the machine seems to anticipate events, while allowing me to sleep easier at about 8.0 cm pressure until the next event begins. And he always would say, "Yes, and if you would just leave it at 10.5 cm, where your titration study indicated your optimal therapy would be, you would never HAVE any events! He respected my knowledge, which I gained here, and I respected his experience. But I always preferred using the APAP settings to the CPAP constant pressure.

I retired and moved North and have an Intellipap there and another S9 Autoset that I bought used with 72 hours on it, as a backup. My wife was recently prescribed a DreamStation and I was impressed by it so I bought one, and another. I'm thinking I might look into getting the S9 repaired by https://acbio.com/cpap-repair/ But 10 years x 365 days/year x 8 hours/day is 29,200 hours. I was retired a couple years ago through a corporate buyout, took early retirement and moved North, but I come back here to take care of Mom about 1/3 the time. So . . . maybe that's 23,000 hours and change?

Maybe I've gotten my money's worth out of my old machine and it's time to move on. But I hate abandoning my S9 just like that. After all, we slept together for 10 years!

[sleepyb]

Just a thought, but my S9 did the same thing when the flash card died.

[Slartybartfast]

I formatted the card and it formatted OK. Wrote to it and retrieved what I wrote. Then reformatted it and plugged it in and cycled power. Same error message. I got a message from someone at acbio.com, who said they repair S9s, but they need to see it before they can tell me if they can fix it. I think at this point maybe it's got too many hours on it to rely on anymore. So I think I'll keep it for parts.

[Laos Film Director]

Slartybartfast, it's time to get rid of the S9. Just dump it. If I followed your posts correctly, you have numerous machines at home which means you have a spare. If you only own one S9, you don't need spare parts.

I have two spare machines but my biggest fear is an all night power outage. I'm lucky where I live (So. Calif) we've not had an all night outage in decades. I'm addicted to my machine and would dread, like you, being without it.

[Slartybartfast]

Yeah, that's sort of the decision I finally came to. It's just that I really liked that machine. It just worked. The nerd in me wants to calculate the approximate number of revolutions the blower turned over the 23,000-something hours it ran. Pretty amazing piece of technology. I have a machine and a spare at home and at my elderly mother's place where I sometimes stay to help her out when she needs me here.

[BanjoPaterson]

G'day Slarty - you've got the nerd in me curious now.

I tried the Airsense 10 and, although they're good machines, didn't like it since I place my S9 under the bed. In the morning, I lean over and check the hours slept and AHI. With an AS10, that means tipping it up slightly and I'm too lazy to do that.

So I bought 3 x S9s with low hours (200, 0 and 120) to replace the one I've got with 14,000 hours (I sold my 4,500 hour one for reasons) over the course of the next 15 years. But your post makes me wonder if the S9 looks at the system clock, and other things besides run hours, to decide when to factory brick it.

I will be replacing the CR2032 batteries in each of them with duracell batteries this December, but I'm now thinking I should adjust their internal clock back as well so each unit "thinks" it's 2014 or something like that. Since my therapy has been reasonably good (AHI sub 1), and I've not used SleepyHead or Oscar, having a precise date is not important. That way, when the S9s reboot (provided they don't write MAX( date and time) to some permanent store), it "believes" it's 2014. That way, I can run each to their max 15-20k hours run time. Anyway - changing the date on the new secondhand machines can't hurt. I'll keep old faithful on its 14,000 hours as a test machine to see when it decides to brick itself.

I'd still like to know what went bad with yours, but getting any type of operational information out of ResMed is nigh impossible. My best guess is that between your run-hours (22,000+) and the CR2032 not having enough charge (even if it read 3v on meter, it may drop when the machine draws it if off main power), somewhere in its CPU brain it decided to brick your machine "for your benefit". My guess, as someone in IT. I can see a manufacturer, and not just ResMed, trying to build in obsolesce.

Hope you're OK. I'd dread not sleeping with my machine active. Keep well!

[rdfry]

The first s9 I got back in 2000 made it a week before it quit. The replacement still works and it has 29,640 hours on it.

[Eazy]

My S9 has 19,500 hours, running great... but will fail eventually.

"Left side with chin elevated seems to work the best." -

a long time ago, while on CPAP but still a lot of apneas at 16CM H2O... I read a post from a person, saying they found wrapping a stuffed giraffe toy around their neck... keeping their head in a more neutral position allowed them to go to 0 AHI.

so... I experimented on myself, inhaling/exhaling, while moving my head from down "fetal position" to full up "snob position" and found a very specific spot down where my breathing was STOPPED. Enter cervical collar.... Yes, I bought a neck collar to try... what the heck . AHI 0.0 almost nightly! I still use CPAP 13CM H2O, but love seeing no events in my charts.

also, pre-cervical collar... when I had so many apneas... in what I called 'clusters' on the charts. Hours with none, then TONS over 30 minutes, then again hours with no apneas. I built a device I strapped to my chest, I could read out next morning when I was [positioned] on my back. The clusters of apneas were 100% of the time, while on my back. My Dr. probably thought I was nuts, but my health IS important to me.

Hope you and your machine+backup machine keep you apnea free!