Troubleshooting S9 humidifier

[elizabeth25]

I have an old S9 machine that I keep at the place where I spend a lot of weekends. I was getting odd error messages that I'd never seen before so I brought it home so I could monkey around with it. The error messages have stopped, but I'm not sure if the heater/humidifer is working. I have it set to 78 degrees and 1.0 for humidity. If I hit the Warm Up button and wait 10-15 minutes the bottom of the tank is mildly warm. But for days, when I check it when I wake up, it is completely cold.
How can I tell if it's still working?
Eliz

[Pugsy]

The setting of 1 for humidity is a very low humidity setting and it's not going to warm up the water chamber very much.
It cycles during the night from off to warmer during the night and it's probably cold to touch in the morning because it is cycling to the "off" part of the cycle.

This has nothing to do with the heated hose setting for the hose air temp either. They are 2 totally independent settings.

The machine uses an ambient humidity sensor in the machine to measure the ambient humidity in the bedroom and then decides how much heat it needs to do or not to do to maintain that low setting of 1....most likely your ambient humidity is relatively high already and it takes very little heat to the water chamber to produce that setting of 1 humidity. It likely spends a lot of time not heating the water.

To increase the odds of it being warm in the morning....increase the humidity setting to something a lot higher but if it is warmer after a 15 minute warm up....it's working.

[elizabeth25]

Oh, okay. Now I get it. I hadn't understood how the temp and humidity worked together. On the weekends my "bedroom" is actually an outdoor sleeping porch. Therefore, a lot more humidity than there would be indoors. You can get away with this in the winter in the Pacific Northwest because the temperature is not that low.
Thanks Pugsy.
E.

[Pugsy]

Ahhh.....you sleep "outside" and where you are at the humidity is already fairly high most of the time anyway.
I wouldn't be surprised if your machine says "man, I don't have to work much at all to keep that setting of 1 or maybe not even work at all"

Sometimes people think that the machine should add even more moisture to the air and in the old days this is what happened but now with the newer machines that have humidity sensors built in that isn't the case anymore. The machine only adds enough to maintain whatever that setting represents. I don't know what the setting of 1 is supposed to deliver and maintain but it very likely is sometimes lower than what your ambient humidity is. You probably don't use much water either. Example....if the setting of 1 is 70% and your ambient humidity is 75% then it won't do much at all because you are already higher than the setting.

I have this happen sometimes when it is raining where I live and I sleep with the windows open and the ambient humidity in the bedroom gets quite high. Even with my rather high setting of 6 I won't use much water at all when it's raining and the windows are open.
But now it is winter and too cold to have the windows open and I have the house furnace drying the air out so ambient humidity is much lower I will use a lot more water to maintain that higher setting being delivered.

[elizabeth25]

This all makes more sense to me now. Summer time is quite dry here (relatively speaking) and I do go through more water then.
Whether I'm sleeping inside or outside, an odd thing happened. When I first started with the Cpap machine I had it set to much higher humidity and was very comfortable. Time went on and it seemed like too much so I moved it to Auto. Then that seemed too much. Something changed in me, but I don't know what it was.
Thanks for a lesson on both the machine and physics.
E.