SCBA fill station SCUBA

[mavdog]

I thought the water was just to keep the tanks cool. less stress on the metal my LDS fills the tanks in water. We just use a whip for Scuba tanks. For SCBA they spin inside the machine. The old system the tank slid inside a container we had one tank pop the valve out taking the fill hose with it. It hit the ceiling scared the hell out of the firefighter that was filling it. We did have a new guy blow a preasure disc once filling another depts tanks 3000 lbs disc will not make it to 4500lbs.

 

[bridgediver]

As water is realitively incompressable, an exploding tank inside of water will actually amplify the damage. In a sense it transmits the shockwave through the water to the vessel holding it and releases the energy there.

If you talk to u/w DMT the clearence they need to be from an explosion u/w is thousands of meters compared to a couple of hundered if on land

 

[vshearer]

We have an Eagle Air for SCBA fills in our FD. One thing we have found when filling SCUBA tanks is having to remove the plastic boot on the bottom of 80 CF tanks. This allows the cylinder to fit into the blast chamber that must be closed and latched to allow air movement from the compressor or bank to the cylinder to be filled. I get real twitchy when I see someone filling a cylinder with a whip or a home made deal and the unrestrained & unprotected cylinder sitting in the middle of the floor. If a cylinder won't fit in our blast drawer it goes somewhere else to be filled.

Been dealing with "Won't happen to me, people" my whole career.

Same experience here, I have an AL80 that is 28.8" with the valve and no boot. That is about .25" too long to close the blast door on the mobile and stand-alone unit that our FD has. So the tank length may be a major issue. The more common AL compact 80's are 28.1".

 

[Desert Pirate]

Bridge, that is what I was thinking as well, which is why you wont find me standing inside the trailer while they are filling tanks. I can remember as a kid putin firecrackers in a hole poked on the top of soup cans, watchin them jump... then you fill an ice cream can about half full of water, place the soup can in, and when it jumped, it went 4-5xs as high. It just dosnt add up as a saftey procedure to me. Now keeping tanks cool... it may help, but hopefully nobody is "flash filling" tanks anyways. It seems to me there is supposed to be a rule of thumb about 100 psi/min or something like that.
Clay

 

[mavdog]

You guys are making me do some research now.
Scott Air System – Operational Guideline
The slower you fill the SCBA cylinder, the cooler you keep the
pressurized air. It is recommended that you fill the cylinder as slowly
as you can. The slower you fill the more air you will fill the cylinder
with. Increased temperature of compressed air displaces more
volume than does air at ambient temperature, hence once a hot filled
cylinder cools to ambient temperature, you will loose 10 to 25% of
your total volumetric capacity. In terms of minutes, on a 30 minute
bottle, this is almost 10 minutes of breathing air.

 

[bridgediver]

Bridge, that is what I was thinking as well, which is why you wont find me standing inside the trailer while they are filling tanks. I can remember as a kid putin firecrackers in a hole poked on the top of soup cans, watchin them jump... then you fill an ice cream can about half full of water, place the soup can in, and when it jumped, it went 4-5xs as high. It just dosnt add up as a saftey procedure to me. Now keeping tanks cool... it may help, but hopefully nobody is "flash filling" tanks anyways. It seems to me there is supposed to be a rule of thumb about 100 psi/min or something like that.
Clay

IMO shops that fill tanks in a tub of water are old school. For the amount of time that the tank is in the water during a fill (even a slow one) the heat that the water will absorb is negligable - it makes no difference.
Also add to the fact that your obviously risking getting water in the tank from this process which is highly likely after multiple fills of a tank in this way

 

[Yotsie]

We've been filling our tanks at our local FD for years. They keep their compressor in excellent working order and the certs on air grade kept up. This saves us a huge amount of time and money. We do fill slow, so as to keep heat to a minimum and the fill to a max. We have two adapters to fill both DIN and Yoke off their SCBA whip.

We will also fill and run our surface supplied rig off their "Light/Air" engine. They are very good about responding on our more lengthy recoveries. It's nice to be able to fill on scene, again at a slow rate.

This is one area were it pays off to be nice to our local hose draggers.... ;-)

 

[Gil57usa]

Our Fire Dept. has been filling our SCUBA bottles from the SCBA cascade for years with no problems. You just have to make sure the air is Grade E or better. Your air quality has to be certified and there should be a certificate posted at the compressor or cascade system.

 

[iguana dan]

1) refer to the US Navy diving manual chapter for scuba and air.
2) refer to nstm Ch074 vol 3 for grade d air standard.
3) refer to navy safety center. Opav 1500.19d
4) refer to US Navy diving manual.

Grade D air is safe for Scuba and it will not change partial pressures of the gasses. The only difference between Grade D air and Grade E is water and oil vapor measurments.

 

[erich k]

Make sure you set up another line with regulator capped at 3000psi so no one screws up using your 4500# reg.
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