Noiey Tubeing

Hi

I've been on CPAP treatment for a while,but still have problems with noise. I've covered my tubeing with a hose covering,also have a hose stand. so the tubing is away from the the bed. But sometimes it is quite load. Like air in the tube, but after a hour everything seems to go quiet.

re: noisy tubing
might it be exceess moisture, either from earlier use, having condensed? Or if you slightly overfilled the humidifier, it gives off quite a racket until the water is lower. Sometimes routing the hose upward from the unit toward your head keeps the water droplets at the humidifier.

Are you sure it is JUST noise in the hose? There may be some of that (I had it and cured essentially all of it) and I am not sure that a hose cover will be enough to stop it.

I had noise from a couple of places, most notably the machine itself. To cure THAT, I actually put it in the bottom drawer of the nightstand (big, deep, open to back and bottom through feet under nightstand) and routed the hose out from there. Nice and easy... turn on machine, put on mask, slide drawer shut. Noise is cut massively. The difference is astounding just getting that closed up.

The other thing I did since I did notice some noise in the hose, quite possibly from the somewhat corrugated nature of the typical CPAP hose. It is this that may well not be helped by a hose cover as that will likely transmit all the way up to the mask. What I did to solve that (and a few other things I wanted to do) was to combine the function of hose and hose hanger into one with PVC pipe. I found that thin wall (Sched 315) 1/2" PVC tubing is not appreciably smaller inside than the CPAP hose and that the outside diameter is almost exactly the 22mm of standard connections and they fit on perfectly. My first round of installation used all 1/2" tubing but a subsequent rework utilized 3/4" thin wall for the bulk of the routing and merely used 1/2" - 3/4" elbows and a stub of the 1/2" for hose connections. This seemed to create a bit of a silencer effect over and above using 1/2" throughout. Both versions are noticably quieter than the hose, I suspect, due to the very smooth bore of the PVC pipe. At either end, I have a short flexible hose (humidifier length hoses work very well here) to both the CPAP and the mask. To keep it clean and neat, I have it routed out the back of the nightstand (a hole saw helped me here) and up behind the headboard of the bed and used adhesive cable mounts and zip ties to secure it. All the elbows used for assembly and routing are dry press fit only; no PVC cement needed at all so when I might ever decide that the tubing needs cleaning, it is easily disassembled. I used 45 degree elbows where possible to reduce the number of sharp direction changes. As to whether it "works" with the CPAP or not, my numbers acquired each day are very definitely NOT changed by any amount I can detect whether I use a regular CPAP hose or my PVC tubing arrangement with significant empirical evidence on both. Conventional wisdom and recommendation states to not exceed 10' total length of the tubing (which I did not) but perhaps that bigger section of 3/4" (if you need to exceed 10') will obviate some of that restriction.

This also meets wife approval in a couple of ways.... When I get up in the morning, I just pull off the short length of the hose from the connection stub on the headboard and toss the mask and all in the drawer on top of the machine. No sign, other than an unobtrusive bit of PVC tubing barely protruding through the headboard, that there is even a CPAP in the room when not sleeping and when sleeping, the noise levels are SIGNIFICANTLY reduced. A side benefit is that the overly bright illumination of the humidifier setting on my machine is taken out of the room. Most of the noise now is mask only and one comes to understand just which masks (of which I have many) are truly quiet and which aren't.

I switch from nasal, to nasal pillow, to full face depending on what feels "right" each night and have a few examples of each (most of which I like and finer grained selection of the "rightness" for the night). By purely subjective assessment, the quietest masks I have are:

• Nasal - Puritan Bennet DreamFit
  Nasal Pillow - Respironics GoLife
  Full Face - Fisher & Paykel HC431 with ResMed Mirage Quattro very nearly as quiet

One is never going to get rid of all the noises as there is a significant volume of air moving but it can be reduced significantly. At least in my case, I have made enough reductions to where, when it used to be the overall system noise that would annoy the boss, now it tends to be the sound of leaks that will wake her when they occur. To my tiny mind, that change alone, to where the leaks (even small ones) are the things that will wake her (or keep her awake) when I have a quiet mask on AND that nights where the "rightness" imposes a noisier mask that she will notice more tells me that I managed a big reduction.

I do hope this helps.