An Interesting Personal Sleep Study

[Starlette]

ROFL! CF you're bad

[questor1]

Last night was only a 4 hour night, but I learned something very important. At 3:30 I woke up breathing in what I thought was a smelly sock. I realized that I had not filled the humidifier and I was smelling the cooking of the biological residue on the bottom of the reservoir that had not been washed in a week. At 3:40 I was washing CPAP equipment and then cooking breakfast. The good news is that it was a 1.0 AHI for the four hours. Lesson learned!

However, that brings up a question. The manual says use distilled water, which I have been doing. However, the process of humidifying seems to be little more than heating the water and blowing air across the surface. There are no small openings to get clogged by mineral build up. Is distilled water really necessary? Had I been using chlorinated tap water, there would have been no biological residue.

[khauser]

Had I been using chlorinated tap water, there would have been no biological residue.

Do you dump the water every day? The chlorine in tap water is all gone past about 24 hours, so things can start to grow. I guess if you top it off each night there's less risk of that.

At any rate, you'll be trading biological residue for mineral residue.

Maybe you need to wash it more often than 1/week. I imagine that is at least partially dependent on ambient temperature.

[Pugsy]

There are no small openings to get clogged by mineral build up. Is distilled water really necessary? Had I been using chlorinated tap water, there would have been no biological residue.

It's not a critical issue. Most of us use distilled water because it means we don't have to worry about mineral deposits left behind from tap water.
It all depends on how "hard" your water is and would the mineral deposit build up bug you and would you want to use vinegar cleaning often.
Where I live the water has a lot of limestone and iron in it. I hate the smell of vinegar. Vinegar cleans away the mineral deposits really easy but it takes a lot of rinsing for me to get the smell to go away. Just more work for me to do and I am a lazy sot who doesn't want to have to do any extra cleaning if I don't have to.

It's probably more of a visual issue than a biological issue. We just like our tanks to be nice and clear because we equate that with clean. There may be some biological issue if tap water is left to sit in the tanks for a prolonged period of time. I don't know how harmful it might be but really don't want to risk it especially since it is so easy to just the distilled water and using distilled water means I don't have to mess with cleaning the tank on some rigid schedule.