International Travel with CPAP

[kimgh]

I recently returned from Australia, which is 16 hours ahead of my home time zone. And actually, it's 17 hours ahead of the time set in my machine, since it was prescribed when I lived in CA, and I now live in ID, and the time has never been changed to reflect my new location.

Thanks to this site, I know know there is a built-in clock in the machine. But I didn't know that when I was in Australia and getting very weird usage times each night, and I was confused about 0.8-1.9 hour usages reported.

Now that I know there's a clock, I see that perhaps when the day in CA changed, the timer must have started from 0 again. The averages continued to be fine, and I assume all actual sleep time was recorded, split between two days.

This sort of explains it, but not completely. I'm not sure why the time did not accumulate from the previous sleep period, but apparently the machine knows how long it has been off between the on periods.

But the question is: does it make sense to reset the time to local time in the time zone I'm in? I read that there are problems with setting a time earlier than it has already recorded, so setting it back when I get home might be a problem for travel to Asia. So perhaps it's better not to mess with things and let the data record how it wants to.

I think, though, that this is a poor design, and it would be nice for some provision for local time zone to be input easily.

Anyone else with experiences like this to share? I have a ResMed S9. I do not travel with the humidifier.

[trish6hundred]

Hi kimgh,
WELCOME! to the forum.!
I don't know the answer to your question but hang in there, someone will be along shortly who can help.
Much success to you with your CPAP therapy.

[DeepBreathing]

G'day Kimg, welcome to Apnea Board.

The CPAP day starts at noon according to the on-board clock, so if you're in a totally different part of the world it's likely your machine is breaking the night's sleep over two days. And combining some of your morning sleep with the following evening. You can reset the clock to accommodate changes in time zones, but if you go backwards (eg from Australia to the US) then it will complain and not accept the reset without erasing data. Personally I don't bother changing the clock.

The Respironics machines take a different approach - every machine is pre-set to GMT / UCT at the factory and can't be reset without special black magic software available only to the initiated at the service centre. Unfortunately the clocks can drift out of time and it's a pain to get them re-set. I'm not sure that one approach is particularly better than the other.

[kimgh]

Hi, and thanks. I had figured out (since I posted here, finally) that the transition from one day to the next has to occur at noon. In my case, the machine was NOT combining the two sessions in the broken up day but only reporting the portion of the sleep day after "noon" California time. But you have at least helped me understand better what is going on. It was a little hard to puzzle it out while I was "down under".

G'day Kimg, welcome to Apnea Board.

The CPAP day starts at noon according to the on-board clock, so if you're in a totally different part of the world it's likely your machine is breaking the night's sleep over two days. And combining some of your morning sleep with the following evening. You can reset the clock to accommodate changes in time zones, but if you go backwards (eg from Australia to the US) then it will complain and not accept the reset without erasing data. Personally I don't bother changing the clock.

The Respironics machines take a different approach - every machine is pre-set to GMT / UCT at the factory and can't be reset without special black magic software available only to the initiated at the service centre. Unfortunately the clocks can drift out of time and it's a pain to get them re-set. I'm not sure that one approach is particularly better than the other.