bactaria in water tank?

[Hose_Head]

I strongly suspect that . . . HoseCrusher . . . failed to run adequate controls to check for and rule-out this source of contamination.

As a result, I wouldn't put too much faith in his conclusions.

Hi Hose_Head,

But why not just run the experiment yourself?

I did.

HoseCrusher's posted observations matched what I found.

Did you do any controls to help isolate potential sources of error? Did you control the flow rate to match that of a typical cpap in use? Please describe your methodology.

[rocklin]

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Did you do any controls to help isolate potential sources of error?

Controls? We don't need no stinkin' controls, hombre!

Did you control the flow rate to match that of a typical cpap in use?

Hmmm, what would be the "typical" flow rate, if I may ask?

I used the same titration pressure that was recommended at SDI, my NYC sleep lab: 10.4

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The machine and hose were at the same level as my bed.

I prepared the water in the same way as I do when I go to sleep.

Then I turned out all the lights, back lit my mask with a Welch Allyn coaxial autostep opthalmoscope in slit scan mode.

The results were recorded in photo burst mode using a GoPro HD Hero2 slow motion digital video camera.

I examined the images in Adobe Photoshop

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If you wish to go further, I have a post here at CPAPtalk describing how to do it:

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=67758&p=630398#p630398

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[HoseCrusher]

The methodology is very simple.

Wash hose, mask, and humidifier tank.
Rinse with distilled water to make sure no residue is left.
Fill humidifier tank with distilled water that you have measured the purity of.
Make sure the xPAP machine is on the floor and the hose and mask are elevated above it in elevation. My set up has an elevation change of 24".
Turn the machine on and adjust the air flow to match the air flow of your mask. This involves blocking the air to your nose and making sure the vent is clear.
Condense the air flow from the mask, and measure the condensate.

Compare the purity of the distilled water you started with to the condensate you ended up with. Since you started with distilled water, if everything is clean you would expect to end up with condensate that has the same value as the distilled water you started out with. I came very close to the same values.

Now that you are sure everything is clean, add some salt to the humidifier tank water and repeat the process.

if this is a pure distillation process, the condensate should match what you had when you ran distilled water without salt.

In my test I found salt in the condensate. This indicates that some water drops are making it up the hose and through the mask.

I decided to take advantage of this "feature." I keep my tank clean and add a little salt to the humidifier water. It's kind of like sleeping on the beach...

I will add that I have had this discussion with my RT and a couple of Pulmonologists. They reported back that a few of their patients were having difficulty with xPAP therapy due to congestion. When they insisted on weekly cleaning of the humidifier tank, the problem congestion disappeared. I don't think they got as far as adding salt, but I was told it wouldn't harm me in any way.

I think it all comes down to what your immune system can bare. You can be pro-active and have a regular cleaning schedule, or you can just let things go and exercise your immune system. If you get sick, have congestion, or have sinus issues, you may want to stack the deck in your favor and clean things a little more often. If you never have a problem, don't worry about it and rejoice in the fact that you have a strong immune system.

[tomjax]

Hosecrusher wrote:
I was told that only water vapor is released from my humidifier. When I tested it I found that water droplets (and salt) are also coming out.

Congratulations Hose crusher.
You are in line for a Nobel prize in physics.
You have also invalidated the entire distillation of water industry.


You have proven distillation does not tak place by showing salt is included in the distillate.
This is on par with the discovery of the Higgs boson.

[Hose_Head]

Thanks for your efforts, HoseCrusher. They are appreciated.

To quote Carl Sagan, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". The experimentation described below is interesting, but I think fails to provide the extraordinary evidence required to justify the conclusions that have been made. With this, I've made a few comments, below on where I find the methodology to be weak and unconvincing. I've also tried to point out what might be done to make it stronger.

The methodology is very simple.

Wash hose, mask, and humidifier tank.
Rinse with distilled water to make sure no residue is left.

At this point, you need to measure the final rinse water as a test of cleanliness. This step needs to be repeated every time you clean your system for the next experimental run.

Fill humidifier tank with distilled water that you have measured the purity of.
Make sure the xPAP machine is on the floor and the hose and mask are elevated above it in elevation. My set up has an elevation change of 24".
Turn the machine on and adjust the air flow to match the air flow of your mask. This involves blocking the air to your nose and making sure the vent is clear.

How did you block the "air to your nose"? Are you certain that the method used did not affect the quality of the condensate? e.g. by addition of salt from sweat?

How long did you run the system?

Condense the air flow from the mask, and measure the condensate.

How did you condense the air flow from the mask? Again, are you certain that the method used did not affect the quality of the condensate?

Did you run the experiment more than once and were your results repeatable?

What instrumentation were you using? Did you do a calibration on it before and afterwards by measuring a control solution and did those numbers match? If they didn't, then any of the other measurements cannot be trusted. Calibration with a control solution is an essential element of any quality experimentation.

When using your mask in this experiment, was it a new mask or one that you had worn before? Did you remove the headgear to ensure that there was no way for it to contaminate the experiment with salt from sweat (headgear likely cannot be adequately cleaned for an experiment such as this one).

Compare the purity of the distilled water you started with to the condensate you ended up with. Since you started with distilled water, if everything is clean you would expect to end up with condensate that has the same value as the distilled water you started out with. I came very close to the same values.

"very close". But not the same. If you had no salt in your humidifier, what was the source of the salt that caused you to come "very close", but not match the salt concentration in your distilled water? Did you also measure the final salt concentration in your humidifier? It too should match that of the starting solution? And did you use controls to calibrate your measuring equipment before and after each measurement? This is needed to ensure that you are measuring what you think you are measuring and to calibrate the experiment.

Now that you are sure everything is clean, add some salt to the humidifier tank water and repeat the process.

if this is a pure distillation process, the condensate should match what you had when you ran distilled water without salt.

In my test I found salt in the condensate. This indicates that some water drops are making it up the hose and through the mask.

My recollection was that you ran your humidifier with salt, first, and later did the run with a "clean" system. Also that you ran no controls to ensure that your system was clean of the salt from the earlier runs. It's also not clear if the headgear is on your mask when you run the experiment, thereby acting as an uncontrolled source of salt (from sweat).

It might be useful to rinse your hose with distilled water and measure it to see if there is any salt in there, too. That sort of control will help determine if the salt is moving through the hose and not just appearing in the distillate water through some other experimental error.

A mechanism for transport of the salt from humidifier to your distillate water also is needed. It has been suggested elsewhere that this is through aerosolisation in the humidifier tank. If this is the case, I would expect that the amount of aerosolisation and resultant salt in your distillate should be directly proportional to the airflow through the humidifier tank. This can be tested in the experiment by carrying out additional runs with varying air flow rates. It would be best to quantify these rates with suitable instrumentation for each run (not sure how you might do this). There should be a lower cut off below which there is no aerosolisation.

Without a plausible explanation of the source of salt that you are measuring in your distillate, all we can really conclude is that the source of salt is unknown, but suspected to be from the salted humidifier. If you can experimentally demonstrate that there is a link between quantity of salt in the distillate to the air flow rate through the humidifier, I think it would be reasonable to conclude that aerosolisation is occurring in your humidifier tank.

Finally, a complete experiment would seek to make predictions about the amount of salt that can be moved from humidifier to mask for various air flow rates and salt concentrations. This would include assessment of various types of salts (not just NaCl - table salt). Admittedly, this may be beyond the scope of a home experimenter.

In all, I think the experiments have been interesting, and you've advanced the discussion about possible movement of contaminants from from humidifier to mask. However, more work is needed to provide confidence in the results.

I decided to take advantage of this "feature." I keep my tank clean and add a little salt to the humidifier water. It's kind of like sleeping on the beach...

I will add that I have had this discussion with my RT and a couple of Pulmonologists. They reported back that a few of their patients were having difficulty with xPAP therapy due to congestion. When they insisted on weekly cleaning of the humidifier tank, the problem congestion disappeared. I don't think they got as far as adding salt, but I was told it wouldn't harm me in any way.

I think it all comes down to what your immune system can bare. You can be pro-active and have a regular cleaning schedule, or you can just let things go and exercise your immune system. If you get sick, have congestion, or have sinus issues, you may want to stack the deck in your favor and clean things a little more often. If you never have a problem, don't worry about it and rejoice in the fact that you have a strong immune system.

[Hose_Head]

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Did you do any controls to help isolate potential sources of error?

Controls? We don't need no stinkin' controls, hombre!

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Scientific experimentation has to have controls, otherwise, you won't be able to interpret or repeat your results.

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Did you control the flow rate to match that of a typical cpap in use?

Hmmm, what would be the "typical" flow rate, if I may ask?

I used the same titration pressure that was recommended at SDI, my NYC sleep lab: 10.4


.

Don't confuse flow rates through a cpap with pressure. They are different things. The flow rate is the volume of air that passes through a given point in the system per unit of time. It should be roughly equal to the vent rate for the mask being used. Vent rates are typically around 30 liters per minute at 8 cm/h2o with a good mask-seal, and higher if the mask is leaking! HoseCrusher appears to have used the mask-leak-rate in his experiment; this would represent a lower boundary for flow rates in a cpap system.

[HoseCrusher]

Hosecrusher wrote:
I was told that only water vapor is released from my humidifier. When I tested it I found that water droplets (and salt) are also coming out.

Congratulations Hose crusher.
You are in line for a Nobel prize in physics.
You have also invalidated the entire distillation of water industry.


You have proven distillation does not tak place by showing salt is included in the distillate.
This is on par with the discovery of the Higgs boson.

Thank you for your generous nomination, but I must respectfully decline...

I have a water distiller that works very well. I only proved that using the humidifier of an xPAP machine to distill water does not work. The humidifier process introduces contaminated water droplets. Real distillation works with water vapor.

When I test the distilled water I have made I find it free of impurities. When I test the water coming from the humidifier, I find impurities. This simply indicates that more than water vapor goes up the hose.

[tomjax]

Hosecrusher<
You are simply wrong in your conclusions or observations.

.Heated water from a tank can indeed produce distilled water, whether pure or saline in the tank.
It is called rainout here..

There is no salt in this distilled water. tHE only way would be some physical shaking or something similar to a cool water humidifier.

Perhaps a few courses in physical chemistry or physics would help you understand a bit better.

You would be equally convincing in describing your recently developed perpetual motion machine.

[HoseCrusher]

Physical shaking... No, but how about some stirring with air.

This isn't my video, but what do you think?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHvjDJL9xX4

Could there possibly be enough stirring to release a few drops?

[HoseCrusher]

Hose Head, I don't think I have made any extraordinary claims. The manufacturer of the xPAP made the claims. I was just checking them. They are the ones that equated humidifier operation to distillation.

I believe we have had these same discussions earlier and you weren't willing to accept the fact that when I use distilled water in the humidifier I get very little contamination, but when I add salt to the humidifier the contamination level is greatly increased.

My measurement of cleanliness was to measure the whole system using distilled water. The results indicated that my cleaning process was very good. The measurement of the final rinse water, in my opinion, isn't as important as the final results coming out of the machine and hose. If the hose, mask, and headband are contaminated, don't you think they would contaminate the condensate during the test? Am I missing something here...?

Now, if I had heavy contamination when I was running the test using distilled water, then your comments would be worth looking into. As it stands, the clean run was satisfactory to demonstrate a difference between runs made using salt water.

When you run your version of this test, be sure to let us know what your results indicate... As a matter of fact, you can run the test your way, and then repeat it my way and see what the difference is.

To touch on the other questions...

I used a Hanna PWT meter.

Equipment calibration was verified.

Air flow does influence the amount of water droplets that make it up the hose.

The xPAP machine, humidifier tank, hose, and mask were used by me the night before, and used again after the test.

The plausible explanation of where the contamination is coming from is that it is riding water drops up the hose from the humidifier tank.

I think a complete test would look a water contaminated with bacteria. It would be very telling if the bacterial also made it into the condensate...

Thank you for your comments. When you run your test, let's compare results.

[Hose_Head]

Hose Head, I don't think I have made any extraordinary claims. The manufacturer of the xPAP made the claims. I was just checking them. They are the ones that equated humidifier operation to distillation.

I believe we have had these same discussions earlier and you weren't willing to accept the fact that when I use distilled water in the humidifier I get very little contamination, but when I add salt to the humidifier the contamination level is greatly increased.

My measurement of cleanliness was to measure the whole system using distilled water. The results indicated that my cleaning process was very good. The measurement of the final rinse water, in my opinion, isn't as important as the final results coming out of the machine and hose. If the hose, mask, and headband are contaminated, don't you think they would contaminate the condensate during the test? Am I missing something here...?

Now, if I had heavy contamination when I was running the test using distilled water, then your comments would be worth looking into. As it stands, the clean run was satisfactory to demonstrate a difference between runs made using salt water.

When you run your version of this test, be sure to let us know what your results indicate... As a matter of fact, you can run the test your way, and then repeat it my way and see what the difference is.

To touch on the other questions...

I used a Hanna PWT meter.

Equipment calibration was verified.

Air flow does influence the amount of water droplets that make it up the hose.

The xPAP machine, humidifier tank, hose, and mask were used by me the night before, and used again after the test.

The plausible explanation of where the contamination is coming from is that it is riding water drops up the hose from the humidifier tank.

I think a complete test would look a water contaminated with bacteria. It would be very telling if the bacterial also made it into the condensate...

Thank you for your comments. When you run your test, let's compare results.

I've been unwilling to accept your conclusions about your experiment because there are apparent flaws in your methodology. I've tried to focus on those in my previous posts in order to help you improve your methodology and experimental results. It's good science to do so!.

I think equally valid conclusions are that you've contaminated your results with salt from sweat on your headgear, and/or that your cleaning methods were incomplete. Since you've not tested for these possibilities, one can never know.

The strength of a theory is in using it to make a prediction and then using experimental methods to prove the prediction. I'm unwilling to accept your conclusions until such testing is performed.

Since I have no other use for a Hana PWT meter, I'm disinclined to spent the $100 or so to buy one just for the purposes of running your experiment. It's your hypothesis. If you believe in it you really should do the proof.

[rocklin]

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When you run your version of this test . . .