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John wrote: >If you really want to know the >truth then ask the people who know and not the ones trying to make a >buck out of it, that means the real industry not the recreational >servers. >And Kent Schnoeker wrote: > It seems to me,that there is alot of Third World Country style, > superstition surounding oxygen in the tech diving comunity. Make a >trip to a welding supply house that also supplies hospitals for their >O2 needs and ask them all of your questions about the handling and use >of O2. All the myths and voodoo that suround O2, will go away forever! > I promise! John wrote: I got to disagree with this. Around here, at least, the industrial gas folks are absolutely useless. They are used to using dedicated gear, so problems of compatibility, tranfilling or mixing etc never arise, and are horrified at the thought of putting O2 in anything but a big green bottle labled O2. Plus they work by rote and have no clear understanding of the rhyme or reason of why they do anything the way the do. Try to corner them and they cite vaguely remembered regulations that they swear exist, but can't actually produce, or tell anectotal horror stories which can't be verified. The same it true, to a lesser extent, with the med O2 people. They use dedicated gear, everything is made to fit together, and never have to stray beyond their little dedicated world where every question has a simple yes or no answer. They never have to make judgements as to whether something is clean enough, or safe enough, decisions the O2 diver has to make all the time. Besides, industrial gas handling practices often simply aren't appropriate to tech diving - industrial gas practice is based on havng such a massive safety margin that the gear can be neglected, mishandlend, and used and serviced by near-idiots. Most of the bullshit about O2 and O2 cleaning one hears in the dive world is a result of trying to directly export O2 "wisdom" from the med/indus gas world to the tech dive world, without making any allowance for different circumstances and realities. And. as mixtures in the nitrox range have very few uses outside diving, and there are, as a result, not a whole lot of hard info and test data on them. If you want an example of what happens when you try to blindly apply industrial standards to the dive world, take a look at our tanks - in the USA are made to the same standard (3A and 3AA) that industrial tanks are, tanks that are expected to be able to endure being dropped off the back of trucks, stored outside, refilled daily, and still last 50 or so years. The result? - the same tank that's an HP tank in europe is a LP tank here, and holds 20 or 30 less cf (for those of us without a compressor). -- Send mail for the `techdiver' mailing list to `techdiver@aquanaut.com'. Send list subscription requests to `techdiver-request@aquanaut.com'.
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