bwell wrote:I did look at the auction sites and saw some amazing deals but I saw a few articles online about sanitizing a used cpap machine - would you have any concerns about that? I must admit I'm a little put off about using a used machine - might be silly but some cpap users have some serious issues and it seems a little too, well, personal to me. Thoughts?
I have seen several threads here about sanitizing machines, so you may want to search for that. Personally, my main concern would be whether the former machine user was around cigarette smoke. As I understand it, that lingering smell can be quite difficult to eliminate.
As far as "germs" go, my thought is that since the machine is blowing air
out, whatever germs are at the mask probably wouldn't make their way
into the machine. I would suppose that there could be infectious organisms circulating around the room, which could potentially be a concern, depending on how effective the machine filter is. But, if you think about it, we're all sharing the same machine when we have our sleep studies, aren't we? I would clean any used machine on the outside very well. I would buy new hosing too, as it's not expensive.
There are
brand new machines offered at places like
http://www.cpapauction.com all the time. Sometimes there are
barely-used machines there too, with only a few hours on them. People often buy a machine, and then either decide not to use it or find that they need a different type of machine. Or the machine is used as a demo. I would probably tend to buy new myself, but given the right circumstances I would consider a used machine if the price difference was very substantial.
