"Industry Standards (US)" What are they?

[NAM001]

sorry i did not include that one because is was suggestins as opposed to standards. I though the c-6.2.1 in included. Youa re correct it is related material. The law issue can be argued either direction but my understanding that the law says compliance with recommendations is required. Lawmaking by proxy. Which gave birth to the 23.5% rule/ proxy law.

Regarding visuals for scuba cylinders and frequency:

CGA P5 Suggestions for the Care of High Pressure Air Cylinders for Underwater Breathing

Which before anyone gets their hoses in knots - the above is not referenced by any CFRs and is not law. Further, they are suggestions not requirements.​

 

[halocline]

It never fails to amaze me how much B.S, rumors, assumption, and garbled readings of some supposed-authority-trade-organization come out in these threads. It never stops!

It's really quite simple. The dive shops and dive boats own the compressors. They make the rules....period. You could argue all day long, and as is shown in this billionth thread on protocols for filling scuba tanks, we apparently do just that.

And the bit about 23.5% O2 percentage requiring O2 clean protocols, nonsense. Maybe in your world, but here on earth the dive industry norm is that 40%O2 or less means no O2 clean requirements. This is easily explained with the real magic word of the dive industry, MONEY! You think it's a coincidence that the practice of requiring O2 clean environments starts at the exact percentage where recreational nitrox ends? Not that there's not all sorts of confusion in various shops about this, but that's a different issue. I once had a certified SP tech insist to me that SP only made piston regs, even when I pulled a MK16 off the wall in the shop where we were having this conversation (and where he was the resident regulator tech!) and handed it to him. So, confusion in dive shops (some, anyway) is kind of like eggs in an omelet.

Restricting anything other than air to O2 clean environments would effectively destroy the recreational nitrox scuba market. It would mean O2-clean BCs, drysuits, every single regulator, effectively no use of any compressor except those that produce O2 clean scuba air....so try running that up the flag pole and see who salutes it.

 

[NAM001]

Boy have you got a lot of learning to do. There is but one reason that compliance is not adhered to and that is that once the tank leaves ther shop,,,no one can prove the tank was ever cleaned or not cleaned. It is solely an issue of enforcement. Do I believe it is rational to use 23.5% as a cleaning point. NO ,,, but it is there and no amount of rational will make it go away. Do i believe it is noncence YES. shops ect own the compressors and are ALLOWED to operate in COMERCIAL ventures so long as they COMPLY to reg's. You are also correct when you Use the "real world driver" MONEY. The cost is the reason the compliance does not exist. NOTE I said compliance not the regulation. Yes many threads exist that say that scuba is exempt from the regs. Even if that is so there are more than one aspect of a scuba business, and those other aspects are accountable to the regs. Those arguments will go on for who knows how long. Am I a nut case that believes that the 24% tank you mixed for me may have been PP blended and therefore had at one time 100% o2 above 50psi or what ever the fear numbers are. NO. The regs are in place to protect the public safety not the pocket book so i am fully aware of where the intentions lie ,,,and the lack of reality is in the business end of providing gas to divers. But after all this, when the day comes that a 747 lands on your shop while you are filling from a non clean system some one will surely say your shop perrished not because of the plane but because of the piping system in your shop. And that is the truth of how the system works. Unfortuhately you wll be out of business till they can determine how much responsibility american airlines has to your total damages and how much was yours. The business end of air is very expensive when done right. We can see air fill prices ranging 10-20 per fill on places. Some shops that used to provide nitrox , no longer do. I can go to a local hole and get a 32% fill for 18$. The way the game is played is the foundtion to why some shops will not fill tnaks unless they do the vis on them. I totally agree with you that reality is out of line with regs. Those tht gert a tank vis, more ofted than not pay 20$ to have the valve removed and someone shine a light in to look for a pile of rust. If no pile alsp a sticker on the tank. That is the real world also. You walk into a shop ans ask how deep of gouge is allowed in a tank and you get tha italian salute and get the " My tank inspector is not here and he would be the one that knows." In the meantime his 15 yo son is looking in tanks for piles of rust and has a pad of stickers in his hand. In the real world the inspection is done to get air, not a health check of your tank. To do other than that cuts into the bottom line and in the real world that cant happen. I agree that the odds are very much in your favor of doing non incidental fills. I also believe that if you do have an incident the odds are in your favor that the cause will be linked to a failure on your part to comply. Once again, real world.

I fill my own tanks for 2 reasons. 1. There are no shops near me and i wont pay the dive site charges for a fill. 2. Most importantly i have seen the fill stations at shops and many are pathetic at best. I have seen many that are good run fill stations, actually more good than bad. For me any shop that says no to a request to see the fill system does not fll my tank. Any shop that cant tell me the last gas tast results does not fill my tank. Any shop that doesnt know what the results mean, does not fill my tanks. So more or less i guess that any shop that is too concerned with the bottom line, does not touch my tanks. And that is the world i live in.

It never fails to amaze me how much B.S, rumors, assumption, and garbled readings of some supposed-authority-trade-organization come out in these threads. It never stops!

It's really quite simple. The dive shops and dive boats own the compressors. They make the rules....period. You could argue all day long, and as is shown in this billionth thread on protocols for filling scuba tanks, we apparently do just that.

And the bit about 23.5% O2 percentage requiring O2 clean protocols, nonsense. Maybe in your world, but here on earth the dive industry norm is that 40%O2 or less means no O2 clean requirements. This is easily explained with the real magic word of the dive industry, MONEY! You think it's a coincidence that the practice of requiring O2 clean environments starts at the exact percentage where recreational nitrox ends? Not that there's not all sorts of confusion in various shops about this, but that's a different issue. I once had a certified SP tech insist to me that SP only made piston regs, even when I pulled a MK16 off the wall in the shop where we were having this conversation (and where he was the resident regulator tech!) and handed it to him. So, confusion in dive shops (some, anyway) is kind of like eggs in an omelet.

Restricting anything other than air to O2 clean environments would effectively destroy the recreational nitrox scuba market. It would mean O2-clean BCs, drysuits, every single regulator, effectively no use of any compressor except those that produce O2 clean scuba air....so try running that up the flag pole and see who salutes it.

 

[ktomlinson]

I still haven't seen reference to a law or regulation stating that cylinders containing gases with less than 40% O2 need to be O2 cleaned. OSHA's Commercial Diving Operations, Equipment subsection seems to put it pretty clearly (§ 1910.430   Equipment. :: PART 1910--OCCUPATIONAL SAFETY AND HEALTH STANDARDS :: CHAPTER XVII--OCCUPATIONAL SAFETY AND HEALTH ADMINISTRATION, DEPARTMENT OF LABOR :: Title 29 - Labor :: Code of Federal Regulations :: Regulations :: Law :: Justia <--- actual regulation, not just a table of contents):

(i) Oxygen safety. (1) Equipment used with oxygen or mixtures containing over forty percent (40%) by volume oxygen shall be designed for oxygen service.

(2) Components (except umbilicals) exposed to oxygen or mixtures containing over forty percent (40%) by volume oxygen shall be cleaned of flammable materials before use.

 

[Scared Silly]

The below reference applies to Commercial diving and specifically does not apply to recreational diving operation.

Reading the full text of the CFR is left as exercise for the reader.

Hint: read Luxfer's summation:

http://www.luxfercylinders.com/freq...linders-in-oxygen-enriched-and-oxygen-service

I still haven't seen reference to a law or regulation stating that cylinders containing gases with less than 40% O2 need to be O2 cleaned. OSHA's Commercial Diving Operations, Equipment subsection seems to put it pretty clearly (§ 1910.430 Equipment. :: PART 1910--OCCUPATIONAL SAFETY AND HEALTH STANDARDS :: CHAPTER XVII--OCCUPATIONAL SAFETY AND HEALTH ADMINISTRATION, DEPARTMENT OF LABOR :: Title 29 - Labor :: Code of Federal Regulations :: Regulations :: Law :: Justia <--- actual regulation, not just a table of contents):

(i) Oxygen safety. (1) Equipment used with oxygen or mixtures containing over forty percent (40%) by volume oxygen shall be designed for oxygen service.

(2) Components (except umbilicals) exposed to oxygen or mixtures containing over forty percent (40%) by volume oxygen shall be cleaned of flammable materials before use.

 

[redacted]

The below reference applies to Commercial diving and specifically does not apply to recreational diving operation.

Reading the full text of the CFR is left as exercise for the reader.

Hint: read Luxfer's summation:

http://www.luxfercylinders.com/freq...linders-in-oxygen-enriched-and-oxygen-service

BLUF: Luxfer says they are a member of the CGA so they support the CGA position of 23.5 %. It really is sad that, with so much real world experience with HP O2 concentrations up to 40%, no one can even attempt to make a case based on accident/incident records. I will continue putting up to 40% O2 in my scuba cylinders with absolute confidence that it is safe.

The regs leave adequate wiggle room to go either way and the record says it is safe.

 

[rjack321]

I have had this cylinder tested at the same shop that did the prior test and clean so no excuse that "someone might have done a bad job last time. However if the standard is to do a clean after test each time I accept it as the "Norm". If however most don't do it unless they have an issue with the cylinder or they didn't do the previous clean and the shop I pick does it every time, then I do have an issue. In that case it would seem over servicing. I don't mind paying reasonable prices for quality work and to the "standard", but hate being ripped off by people who don't do what they charge for or over service. Ok understand about the bow check not being under pressure, however how do you do this with the tank mesh on and tape on? Suspect someone is not doing the service as per the spec, just charging for it.

I own my own compressor. I partial pressure blend in some cylinders. I O2 clean those cylinders (and especially the valves) after they are hydroed. Go to a hydro shop sometime, they are filthy places. Yes some hydro shops also service Oxygen cylinders, mine does not they are strictly a scuba hydro shop. So I don't trust whatever "film" of grime their water might leave on the inside of my tanks, particularly the ones which need to be O2 clean. I have no idea what Australian hydro shops look like, they could be models of cleanliness for all I know.

 

[bletso]

The water at the hydro shop is nasty old crap with rust and who knows what else in it, its reused and been in countless mystery cylinders before. Afterwards its common practice to steam wash the finished cylinders as the hot water speeds drying. They are sometimes "O2 clean" after this practice and sometimes not. If you have ever seen an O2 fire, particularly in an AL cylinder which is great fuel, you'd understand the reticience of the shop to trust anyone else's post-hydro cleaning.

I don't know where you get yours tested but my shop uses clean tap water for each and every cylinder. We test thousands of cylinders a month. Engineered Inspection Systems, Inc. Home Page We treat steel scuba cylinder different than industrial cylinders as we use N2 to purge and dry them. We use no additives to steel cyls due to health concerns. N2 for drying is all it takes to prevent flash rust. Al cyls are dried with hyper filtered air. If O2 service they are cleaned for O2 service after hydro.

 

[Wookie]

I don't know where you get yours tested but my shop uses clean tap water for each and every cylinder. We test thousands of cylinders a month. Engineered Inspection Systems, Inc. Home Page We treat steel scuba cylinder different than industrial cylinders as we use N2 to purge and dry them. We use no additives to steel cyls due to health concerns. N2 for drying is all it takes to prevent flash rust. Al cyls are dried with hyper filtered air. If O2 service they are cleaned for O2 service after hydro.

I would suggest that your facility is far more proactive and maybe has a better grasp of requirements and common sense than many. I remember when I had bank bottles come back from hydro with CO2 in them. That's what the hydro facility used to inert them. It made the first air test read on the order of 10,000 ppm CO2. Captain frank had a little meltdown when he saw that......

 

[halocline]

The below reference applies to Commercial diving and specifically does not apply to recreational diving operation.

I believe that the OSHA regulations exclude recreational diving at least in part because OSHA governs workplace environments, not home or recreational environments. This is a guess on my part, but I suspect that they simply don't feel that it's in their domain to try to regulate non-workplace activity. It invites more flak to do so, and any administrative organization tries to avoid that. But clearly one cannot interpret their exclusion of recreational scuba from the 40% practice as an indication that recreational scuba should be subject to more stringent regulations than commercial diving.

The luxfer language is a great example of liability avoidance, pure and simple. It specifically refers to their tanks only. They don't want any part of a scuba-based lawsuit, and I suspect that scuba is a fairly small percentage of their product business.

I have yet to see any hard evidence of a single incident of recreational nitrox combusting, ever. Maybe one exists, if so I'd be interested in it. Partial pressure blending excepted, of course, as that is 100% O2 handling.

There simply cannot be any arguing that the dive industry norm, as taught in all recreational nitrox classes by the major agencies, usually at the very same shops providing nitrox fills, is that under 40% O2 requires no special handling. Whether or not anyone thinks that is reckless, or even that it breaks federal regulations or recommendations, is irrelevant, and just another example of the confusion and mis-information that perpetually follows nitrox use like a dark cloud.