[posted by: Sakasuka
"hI'm curious how you evaluated this.
Did you have a head, rinise it with tap water. Then get another head, rinise it only with distilled water (not to be confused with sterile water) and then compare times?
Or did you have just one head, rinse it with tap water, then switch to distilled water, and not see an imporvement?
I would like to know how you evaluated that distilled water wasn't any better, out of curiosity. Thanks"
Amy,
Yes, we did have several old neb heads that didn't work or that were very slow 15+ min. We were at the point of not using the eflow any more even though we loved evey other aspect of it. The great frustration on the times going up were maddening!! We were constantly calling FoundationCare for ideas (they didn't have any not because they didn't want to help, they were great, but they didn't know how to help us because the product was/is so new).
We figured we had one last very non-scientific attempt to make it work. SO we experimented. We had about 5 neb heads to work with. First I started soaking them all in as many different solutions as I could think of that might work. Vinegar, hydrogen perxoide, alcohol, and baking soda and vinegar (reaching for anything I could think of). THe vinegar worked the best the time was 5 min. the next was the hydrogen peroxide 7.5 min. I then soaked them all in vinegar and all of the times were brought down quite a bit.
After that I tried the different ways of rinsing the head. Once again my only evaluation was timing them. I tried keeping everything the same except the way in which I rinsed ( I had two heads that were each 5 min.) The first time I did it the time went up a little 30 sec. or so, I repeated my non-scientific experiement several more times and each time the one that I rinsed only in distilled water went up. For us...it was a little proof to do what was working.
If I am not mistaken, distilled water can be made into sterile water by boiling it for 10 min correct. If I am wrong I would appreciate someone informing me. I love to learn, but so far that is what we use for all of our cleaning except the faucet water which we use to shake off the medicine.
Oh, we did recieve a new head not to long ago (they sent us one without us calling how fun was that after almost 10 months of constantly needing a new head because ours didn't work) we tried our little experiment of using only the distilled/sterile water and the times went from 3 min to 5 in about 3 treatments. I don't know if 5 is just our lucky number, but at five min. we switched to doing it our old way. Stuck it back in the box for later use.
Amy, just curious I know you are using a few different meds than we are, have your times stayed the same? How about the Hypertonic?
There is a wealth of wisdom and experience on this site any I love it that we can learn from each other. I am open to learning what works well.
Tiffany
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