In my pprevious posts, I explained why I picked this soft chamber, which was the only 2.0 ATA capable soft chamber I could find and woudl be willing to trust. Olive and Hugo sell the same chmber but different concentrators. I picked Olive because they have a better background in oxygen conentrators and Hugo/Lannx had a shady past in selling badly packed and/or non working hardware in the past.
Please read these older posts on why I selected a chamber that did more than 1.5 ATA (and would not even consider a 1.3 ATA chamber), why you simply should not buy a US made chmaber due to the 1.3ATA limitation, and how I selected chambers that I felt were well made and would deliver the proper amount of oxygen under pressure.
So, this is what I got in the end:
To all the armchair HBOT experts on FB (including those who have worked in facilities with hard chambers), and keep telling everyone that only hard chambers can be trusted, I wish they would open up to the present a little bit and recognize that one can make 2.0 soft chambers that worsk fine for a much cheaper price than a hard chamber.
Obviously hard chambers are more polished and easier to get in and out of, so if many is no issue, go ahead and get one, but if you'd like to get 2.0ATA for $10k or less, Olive is the way to go.
Important poins with this chamber:
I will state right now that the seat belts that are added for strength and integrity, are a little bit of a pain to operated on your own, but it's perfectly doable. My guess is that you cannot get 2.0 ATA safely on a soft chamber without them.
Olive, in an attempt to save me money, sold me the chamber without the inside frame. I made sure to tell them that this was stupid. The chamber is really a pain to use without the inside frame, and the frame, while a bit flimsy, is cheap and does the job
Again, Olive tried to save me money by not including an air cooler, but come on, if you compress air to twice its pressure, it will get hotter, there is just no way around it. The chamber was way too warm and humid without the cooler. It was so warm that it was barely usable without clothes. Unless you are going to use it in a very cold room, it's not reasonable to use without the air cooler
Because thngs can't be too easy, the first air cooler they sent me, was misconfigured from the factory and did not release the water it created, so the air getting in the chamber was super humid and the cooler was making small pool of waters around its high voltage input. OMG, that was not safe! Eventually we did get it reprogrammed to open the valve every 2mn and dump the excess water
But even then, it did not come with a hose or anything, it just dumped the water on the ground, not cool (I had to add a tube and bottle to capture that water). This is easy to fix of course.
And while the first cooler might have worked for some people, I still felt the air was too warm for my use, so I had to wait for a newer and bigger cooler which finally did the job (but still had a water release that dumped water on the floor unless I had my own tube to redirect it to a container)
I did test that the compressor properly delivered over 90% O2 at almost 10 liters per minute when the chamber was at 2 ATA (which means the concentrator has to make 20lpm of O2, something that the Lannx/Hugo failed to do in the videos I saw). This is by far the most important point, most concentrators/compressors uterly fail to deliver the promissed airflow and O2 concentration in the chamber.
Now that you know all this, you can skip the shortcomings I had to deal with, and are now all fixed for me. I'm also being honest with what I experienced to point out that I got a great deal money-wise, but it did involve a bit of time to iron everything out. The good news is that you can skip all of these issues now as the vendor is aware of them (I Was one of the first buyers).
Let's look at pictures. This is how it arrived from China, in 2 boxes, the smaller one had the soft chamber and parts, and the bigger heavy box with the oxygen concentrator and compressor:
not something you can lift on your own
I managed to figure out how to open it and got the heavy concentrator that has wheels
what it looks like
plus parts. The manual didn't really say hwo to assemble it, but it was reasonably obvious
first job was to use the compressor hose to inflate the two stands
all done
the chamber does look like a mess with the seat belt mesh
thankfully all parts had different size hoses or thread so it was not possible to get things wrong
taking shape
a small remote that was meant for some other device that only allows on/off functionality
building the chamber the first time was still a bit of trial and error, especially with the belts and hoses
first pressure test at 1.7 ATA
As explained above, the chamber without the frame takes a long time to inflate, and it very cumbersome to zip up from inside, so after telling Olive "why on earth did you not sell me the frame", I got it and installed it. It also came with limited instructions, and I found it was best to half built it outside and then then bring it in side for final assembly:
not super easy to put together, but doable
connecting the bars was 'fun'
and now the chamber doesn't collapse to the ground when it's empty
it looks a bit flimsy, but does the job
once the chamber is inflated, the frame does not matter anyway
This video shows the pressure going down after I opened the release valve inside the chamber, and how you can open it and get out, on your own:
Yes, you can get out by yourself
How long does it take to inflate?
takes around 5mn to get to chamber fully inflated and pressure going up
and another 5mn or so to get to 1.7ATA
Then, the next problem was fixing heat:
unsurprisingly, the compressed air is very warm (it's celcius of course)
had to buy this peltier cooler, it helped
it was ok at start
but by the end, it was starting to get warm
problems with it creating water, though
due to a bug in this relay to release water
this is what it did before the relay release was fixed
and yeah, the first cooler was only so good, 32C output was still warm
Because the first cooler didn't cool enough for me, I waited until Olive had a new cooler (that works more like a fridge) and it was more seriously built without exposed high voltage and easy risk of shorting and smaller risk of fires (the peltier one was a bit of a joke safety-wise). Sadly, it still din't come with anything to route the water that would just fall on the floor, so I had to get my own tubing and a bottle to capture that:
the older cooler is smaller and in the back
So, I did use the chamber at 2.0 ATA, but in the end I elected to use it at 1.7 ATA so that I don't have to worry about oxygen toxicity, and as a middle ground between higher pressure treatment and lower pressure ones (some actually work better with slightly lower pressures). I did check that the Olive compressor did a good job doing the right pressure and O2 concentration:
note 95% at 10lpm, while a Hugo test I saw showed numbers that were terrible
I confirmed it did deliver around 10lpm inside the chamber
Now the last bit I need to mention is nose canulas are worthless for giving you 100% O2, and most masks are also crap as they let outside air in. I recommend you get this kind of mask with a bag so that the bag fills up when you're not breathing and you get a real full breath of O2 when you're actually breathing:
So there you go, this is what the chamber really looks like and how it works. Despite Olive not selling me everything I needed when I first got it, and having to order in pieces, I'm very happy with the end result, and I'm still convinced it's the only soft chamber that can do 2.0ATA safetly for that price.
How do you get one?
It depends on what country you live in. In some countries, Olive sells direct, in others, they use distributors, which you have to use but will sell to you locally and provide local support and warranty. The latter does cost a bit extra, but having someone local to help is of course a plus.
In the US: affordablehyperbaricsolutions@gmail.com (I did talk to them quite a bit while choosing between Olive and Hugo last year, and they were helpful in providing info on poor past experiences with Hugo, which is why they picked Olive and I did too. They Emailed me to offer buyers a 10% rental discount or 5% purchase discount if you ask them :) ).
Outside the US distributor #1: please contribute and I will add to this page
While I'm at it, Olive did not provide me any discounts or payment for this blog. They did however help me timely when I was buying and working through the problems I mentioned above, so I was satisfied with their customer support, but if you work with a local distributor, you will be better taken care of and avoid the trial and error I went through.
