brin_bellway | (no subject) (Reply)

[fairly mild cw: illness]

I have acquired an MSA Advantage 900 respirator!

Bullet-point review:

I am *loving* the speech diaphragm (which was my main goal in buying this). It makes a *huge* difference in how well people understand me. I can explain complicated things to customers now! I can *attend social gatherings* in a P100!

(and not a moment too soon: there were at least three people sniffling on the bus ride over)

(I was going to wait longer before buying this since I have like two or three more pairs of 3M filters I got on sale, but I've been putting it off for a while now and--the final straw--I was recently handed another complicated thing I am expected to explain to customers. And hey, I have enough respirators now--between these two, my original one that has developed a slight leak at high pressures but which I expect is still substantially better than nothing, and the 3M 6502 that International Safety sent me by mistake and let me keep--that in a pinch I could outfit my whole family with them, so that's a nice thing to have in my back pocket.)

The particulate-only filter, with its relative lack of scent-blocking, is actually fine as long as you go in expecting it. I *have* kind of been missing scentscapes lately; also, the water-resistant filters do have a(n admittedly rather hard-to-use) button for letting you test-strangle yourself, which does a lot to make up for absence-of-leakage not being as obvious by smell. (P.S. Also also, having now worn it in contexts where I would previously have worn a KF94, there *is* still a noticeable difference.)

It's valveless, offering 99.97% *outgoing* protection and not just incoming. Which will be nice for times when I've just left a quarantine and am worried that maybe I ought to have been in longer, plus there's always the chance of asymptomatic infection.

The lack of valve does mean that breath condensation builds up in the mask a lot. I tried sticking a silica packet inside (having heard this on the mask-nerd grapevine), *way* overshot the dehumidification, and ended up with air so dry it fucked up my sinuses. (*And* the silica packet was soaked through by the time I took the mask off, after a little over five hours.) It's possible it would have worked fine if I were desert-adapted or maybe even winter-adapted, but it's the rainy season and going straight from 70% humidity to whatever *that* was was not fun.

The other rec was cotton balls, but even with tucking those about as far out of the way as I could they ended up muffling me, thus defeating the point. After that I just started tanking the condensation.

I think the extra-high humidity is making it easier to deal with limited water access.

(In a conversation a couple days ago, I semi-jokingly called the respirator a "stillsuit".)

It's less comfortable, especially on the bridge of my nose (creating a sore spot after a while), but I remain hopeful that I will find some better strap positioning or something. (Positioning it higher on my face helped somewhat; I tried a tiny dab of petroleum jelly, which also helped somewhat but might not be worth making the mask harder to seal.)

On that note, the strap system is a tad unfortunate: I'm going to miss being able to adjust the back-of-head strap and the neck strap separately.

Was it worth $127 all-in? Yeah, I think it was. I'm not sure yet if I'd want this as my only mask, but I *am* sure that I'm very glad to have it in my toolkit.

Brinens and Things