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Thanks a bunch hosecrusher, thats what I wanted to know. Just a simple comparative bench mark

My water usage
I use about 90 ml of water / night with the temperature at 26 deg C (79 deg F) with a climate hose.
Factors affecting usage.
My median pressure is about 8.2. At this pressure the mask bypasses about 30 l of air / minute
I breath about 6 - 7 l / min and my leak is about zero.
Therefore my total usage is about 37 l/min
The major factor affect water usage will be the absolute air humidity, temperature and humidity settings, and air leakage in that order?
Mask pressure also has a major affect on the amount of air bypassed. This is detailed in the ResMed document
http://www.resmed.com/assets/documents/ ... lo_eng.pdf
Looking at the local weather information I note that the relative humidity on most nights is about 70% at 10 deg C. This is probably the main reason I don't use a lot of water.

To my fellow Americans who are wondering just how much 200 ml (Hosecrusher's amount) and 90 ml (greg-g's amount) are in the archaic units we us here:

1000 ml = 1 liter, which is just a wee bit bigger than a quart. That makes 250 ml about the same as a standard US measuring cup.

So 200 ml is a about 4/5 of a cup---a bit more than 3/4 cup for those of you who cook a lot.

And 90 ml is a bit more than 1/3 of a cup.

HoseCrusher wrote:Well, I happen to keep track...

Consistently sleeping in a wide variety of environments due to travel, I use just under 200 ml a night. I put 200 ml in at the beginning of the night, and when I wake up I toss the remaining, which isn't much.

That's about how much I use with my Remstar humidifier set on 2...just under a cup.
J

and 200 ml is the bottle that you think is a half pint! The "pint" is 375 ml. See who loses in this deal? Oops, maybe that was OT.
Ditto to our archaic measuring system. Why can't we move on?
To the OP, being "normal" or "average" is over-rated. Be comfortable.

I fill mine to the Max Line. Until recently, I had to fill it every other day, or it would run dry on the 3rd night. This past week, it started running dry on the 2nd night, so now I'm topping it up every day.

The humidifier should be designed to not self destruct if it runs out of water.

However, it may very well get hotter, which will probably shorten the life of the humidifier.

It would probably be a bad idea to run it that way all the time.

archangle wrote:The humidifier should be designed to not self destruct if it runs out of water.

However, it may very well get hotter, which will probably shorten the life of the humidifier.

It would probably be a bad idea to run it that way all the time.

In my case running it out of water was a good thing! It stunk bad. When I looked at it I saw grayish dry crud on the bottom of the tank, some of it curled up and flaked off. That's when I discovered that not cleaning the tank in several months had allowed some sort of biological buildup to accumulate in it. I wondered why the water level gauge was getting so hard to read!! And I'm using distilled water to boot!

That's when I decided I needed to thoroughly clean the tank every 2 or 3 months at least.

Running the tank dry will leave residue in the bottom, and probably also develop an interesting smell dependant on the quality of water and the time since the water was last changed.
I don't think the tank will get any hotter if its full or empty. The tank will always be at the temperature the machine thinks necessary to obtain the required humidity, it doesn't know if its empty or full.
I would probably try vinegar to remove any residues if water didn't work.

I use Jack Daniels now instead of water; kills two birds with one stone.

Murray L. wrote:I use Jack Daniels now instead of water; kills two birds with one stone.

Don't joke about it. There are some gadgets to produce alcohol vapor for inhalation. Sort of like a bong.

Unfortunately, if you heat up liquor, it can produce enough alcohol vapor to become flammable (or more flammable than normal.) Add airflow to get more oxygen, and you might get an actual fire hazard.

It probably won't actually make a flame thrower, but I'm not going to be the guinea pig.