How Effective Are CPAP Ozone Cleaners?
If you have a CPAP machine, you’ve heard and know how important it is to keep it clean to protect both yourself and your machine. If you’ve never cleaned your CPAP machine before, there are several things you’ll have to do to clean and care for it. Manually cleaning it is a very popular method, but it can be time-consuming to get it really clean.
Since you use your CPAP for eight hours a night, it has plenty of time to get dirty. Each time you exhale air, you exhale warmth and moisture straight into your mask. Tiny microorganisms thrive on this warm and moist environment, and they’ll grow unless you clean it. But, are ozone CPAP ozone cleaners effective, or should you stick to the manual way of cleaning it?
Why Clean Your CPAP Machine?
Your CPAP equipment has a heated humidifier and heated tubing, and it gets humid over the night. These are the perfect conditions for fungus, yeast, or mold to grow and thrive. When the moisture starts to build up from you breathing night after night and the machine warming the air, molds can start to accumulate.
This can be extremely dangerous to your health, especially if you already have underlying health conditions to worry about. Routing cleaning your CPAP machine is essential, and you should clean it following the manufacturer’s instructions. You can clean it manually, or you can use something like a CPAP ozone cleaner to accomplish this task.
How to Manually Clean Your CPAP Machine
People have been manually cleaning their CPAP machines for years, and many people are very comfortable with this five-step process. It’s relatively straightforward, but it’s also time-consuming. This is why people are shifting to alternative cleaning methods like the ozone cleaner.
Step One
The first thing you want to do is make sure that you unplug your CPAP machine from the power source before you start anything. Trying to clean it while it has power is a good way to electrocute yourself accidentally. Never submerge your CPAP in the water when you clean it.
Step Two
Dismantle your CPAP by detaching the mask from the tubing, removing the headgear, and remove the CPAP tubes from your power source. Remove the humidifier and the water chamber, and double-check your user manual for a guided step by step process. You don’t want to break something accidentally.
Step Three
Get a soft, wet cloth and start gently cleaning your gear. You can add some sensitive skin dish soap or baby shampoo to the water if you’d like, or you can use a mixture of vinegar and water for a more thorough clean. Wipe down all of the accessories and parts of your equipment, and make sure you change the water at least once during the cleaning process.
Step Four
Once you wipe everything down, let it soak in the warm water for around 30 to 45 minutes. You have to give everything a few hours to air dry before you use them again, or you run a much higher risk of developing mold in the tubing and in the other pieces of equipment. Repeat this cleaning process once a week.
Step Five
If your CPAP has filters, perform routine checks on them and see if they have to be cleaned and dried regularly. If they don’t, you’ll most likely have a filter system that needs to be periodically replaced at least once a month. Your user manual will be able to tell you which one it is.
Read: Are Ozone CPAP Cleaners Safe?
What a CPAP Ozone Cleaner Does
If manual cleaning sounds like it could be too time-consuming to do every week or if you’re prone to forgetting, a CPAP ozone cleaner is another viable option. It’s important to note that the FDA doesn’t endorse the use of any machine to clean CPAP equipment because they haven’t done enough studies to see how effective they are. However, they haven’t banned using them either, and many people report positive experiences with using one.
In short, a CPAP ozone cleaner pumps activated oxygen through your supply tube and traps it into the humidifier reservoir to clean the inner walls and the water. The activated oxygen continues to move through your CPAP hose and destroys any bacteria it encounters in all of the small spaces. The activated air then goes to your mask and passes through it to clean it like it did the reservoir and hose.
Eventually, the activated oxygen will travel through a special filter and exit the chamber. This filter switches the activated oxygen or ozone back into the oxygen we breathe in two hours. After two hours, they claim that it’s safe to use your equipment again, and they claim that there will be no lingering ozone to worry about.
Why Ozone Cleaners Can Be Effective
Ozone is a very popular filtration and sanitation system because it can kill up to 99.9% of all bacteria that will grow on your CPAP equipment. Once it reaches the activated oxygen state in the CPAP cleaner, it’s an extremely powerful and fast-acting cleaning agent that dissipates very quickly. It also destroys mold and viruses.
The fact that it saves time is another point in favor of one of these cleaning devices because very few people want to dedicate the time to manually cleaning the CPAP once a week, and many people forget. With this device, all you have to do is put your equipment in, switch it on, and let it run. Just make sure you give yourself at least two hours between the time it finishes cleaning and when you use the equipment.
Bottom Line
So, are CPAP ozone cleaners effective? According to reviews, yes. They can be very effective when you use them correctly to clean your CPAP equipment. Even if you want to wait for the FDA to make a more concrete ruling, you now know that you have options available for you to keep your equipment clean and you healthy.
