Northwest Dive Club

I was wondering if folks would give me the benefit of their experience. I have a max air 35 portable gas powered compressor and am setting up a new to me max air 90 that I would like to plumb in a CO dect to run real time sampling while the compressor is running. I am currently using a portable unit to sample test random tanks which is not full proof. Now that I will be setting up more of a permanent fill station and thought now would be the time to head that direction. I am not mixing nitrox at this time however may be moving in that direction. What animal would you recommend and a good place that has a net presence to make the actual purchase.

thanks for your input
Herb

You could just get one of those moisture & CO2 eyes ?

http://valvesandregulators.aquaenvironm ... -indicator?

You want a real CO meter measuring to 1ppm not the CO cop dots which frequently expire, dry out over time and dont turn black until 50 ppm. You need a way to bleed off 2lpm to the CO meter, i use a med O2 reg I got off ebay and can measure CO, O2 and or helium percent through any meter i hook up to it. The inlets to most regs are 1/4" ntp so just T off anyplace downstream of your filters and you have real time monitoring. For CO i have any oxycheq meter but any meter reading to 1ppm will do.

Personally i don't do any of that continuously anymore...

I analyze every tank for CO, O2, and helium. I write the results plus the date on the analysis tape on the crown. No analysis, no dive.

What CO analyzer are you using?

I am currently using a Analox EII co dect. I am sorry to say that i don't use it as much as i should meaning i do not check every tank and was hoping that there was something that could be plumb in the line to sample real time that would be more automatic

I may be looking for the lazy option that isn't really out there and the true answer may be to stop trying to make it harder than it is and actually use what i have
Herb

I can send you a photo of my plumbing. but since I would never rely on that monitoring in lieu of 02 analysis of the actual tank I'm gonna breath I don't use any of my continuous plumbing anymore for O2, CO or helium. Its just a dead end in my panel.

CO takes about 15 seconds once you have the O2 flow meter attached and are done with the O2 analysis. Helium takes a little longer since I have to let the analyzer warm up for a few mins.

Good topic, as I was thinking about continuous monitoring, and find one with an alarm that one could use to shut power off to the compressor.

KneeDeep wrote:Good topic, as I was thinking about continuous monitoring, and find one with an alarm that one could use to shut power off to the compressor.

I guess if you have nothing better to work on it would be cool. Although it would also have to shut down any O2 feed to avoid spiking that (assuming you are continuous blending nitrox).

I prefer analyzing every tank and writing the analysis on the crown. Its cheaper, simpler, and doesn't take any time once the flow meter is hooked up for O2 analysis anyway.

I still need to take a pic of my plumbing for you, my bleed off reg only goes to 3000psi because I originally set this up for CBing trimix and I didn't want to be pumping helium through the compressor at HPs. I CBed a higher percentage at lower pressures, shut off the helium, then blew the remainder of the helium out of the filters with a 32% top off. So it wouldn't actually work for CO analysis at all possible pressures since I CB nitrox into my banks at up to 4500 psi. But it was an inexpensive ebay Med O2 reg and worked fine for what I was using it for. Getting a suitable reg to bleed for gas at 2lpm throughout the whole fill range 0-4500psi is going to be expensive and it will probably require fiddling to keep the flow rate constant.

"Necessary" is up to you. Its pretty binary, there's either no CO or the tank is fatal. Perhaps not a big issue here in the PNW because the running temps are pretty low. Its a huge issue in FL and the tropics, I would never travel to heat without a CO meter. You can see the various incidents on SB, there are several per year. More and more of them are being caught before there's a fatality because (thankfully) so many people have portable CO meters now.