Resmed F30 elbow leak.

Hi all, I moved from a Philips Amara View FFM to the ResMed F30 FFM a month or so ago. OSCAR consistently showed large leaks with the Amara View (sometimes up to 60% of the night) for years, so I gave the f30 a shot. It’s not as comfortable, but the leaks immediately dropped to near zero and have stayed at that level, which IMO is more important than comfort (although I’ve more or less gotten used to it now).

Everything was going fine until the middle of last night when I started hearing a light hissing. I thought it might be a problem with the mask so I replaced it in the frame with a new one. That didn’t solve the problem, and thankfully I had a full replacement as a back up, so I tried the elbow from it on the setup I’d been using. That worked.

The thing is, the elbow that is now hissing is only a month or so old, and I can’t figure out what might be causing the issue. I’m a side sleeper and wondering if perhaps I put pressure on it “the wrong way” and broke something. Is that likely?

I’ve inspected it fairly closely and it looks identical to the functional one. I searched this sub and apparently people have elbow issues after cleaning, but that’s not relevant here. Still, I tried following the posted solutions with no success. One person mentioned that some of the air vent holes might have gotten clogged and to try using a water pick to clean them, which I did. Still, no luck.

I’ve since ordered a few replacements but if possible, I’d like to fix the original one. Is this a DIY project or should I just scrap it?

Three F30 masks in about 5 years (if I remember correctly), side sleeper, and that's never happened to me.

I discovered that cleaning the elbow by soaking it in a denture cleaner solution, and then rinsing thoroughly does a great job of unclogging. And I can promise you my first elbow was plenty clogged before I discovered that method. It never leaked.

Unless the elbow's plastic cracked, the only part I can imagine breaking is something in the "side buttons" of the elbow, which you're supposed to squeeze in order to separate the elbow from the frame.



(Image copied for the sake of clarity from the Resmed F30 Manual page 5)