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Comment by genewitch | Hacker News Reader

as siblings commented, pure oxygen gets you high. a couple of breaths of pure oxygen will relieve pain and induce euphoria. I am not entirely clear on the definition of "narcotic" so i may be being redundant.

My issue, though, is i can't find a way to safely generate oxygen for a decent price. I know electrolysis works, but these atomic sieves look safer. They're also difficult to acquire without a prescription, at least from my searches in the US. And i know lithium can react to generate oxygen, but that's not what i consider "safe".

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Someone else in this thread mentioned diving. When I was doing my advanced open water course, we did an exercise to demonstrate nitrogen narcosis. Super simple test: we had a card with the numbers 1-16 written on a 4x4 grid in random order. You have to tap the numbers in order and it’s a timed exercise. We did it on the surface in the boat and again at 30m depth; my performance was maybe 20% slower, my buddy was more like 40-50% slower.

Wouldn't being underwater make you slower just due to the extra resistance of water vs air?

Just being submerged in the water is probably what they mean by 'at the surface'.

The resistance shouldn't change much whether you are 30cm in the water or 30m.

Yeah, apologies, we did the first round about 6 feet below the surface. For me, at least, the resistance wouldn't have made a huge difference anyway; while some people suffer from nitrogen narcosis and don't realize it, I definitely felt mentally "slow" while doing the test at depth. It was frustrating knowing that, 15 minutes earlier, the task felt easy but at depth it felt really mentally challenging. While I was only about 20% slower, the qualitative mental effort was drastically higher.

> a couple of breaths of pure oxygen will relieve pain and induce euphoria.

Nah.

I've breathed pure oxygen under water for 10 minutes at a time at a ppO2 of 1.6 and it doesn't really do much.

> My issue, though, is i can't find a way to safely generate oxygen for a decent price.

Depends on the definition of generate and decent price, but you can buy stationary medical oxygen concentrator for $1000, portable for $3000. If you want something easier you can buy pre-filled bottles or refill existing bottles at industrial gas supply places. If you want more, you can get a concentrator setup which small private airports use to refill oxygen bottles for small private airplanes.

And lastly, if you need small amount quickly, you can buy Boost Oxygen Bottles from Amazon.

I know a guy with a glassblowing shop who gets all his oxygen from old medical concentrators he refurbishes

$1000-$3000 isn't decent for my use case; basically i want to use oxygen instead of ibuprofen for minor aches, coupled with heat or cooling. I find that pure oxygen does wonders for minor headaches and neck pain that i experience. $15-$25 a liter for oxygen is also not a decent price, relatively.

At one point i found some concentrators that were ~$500, sadly i did not order and the brand name was alphabet soup; good luck finding that again!

$1000 is for brand-name. Used/imported are cheaper.

Refills of LOX are cheap, but you need to pay for the cylinder, which is expensive. At the end of the day you can get welding oxygen, which is exactly the same as medical/aviator. (And also you need to handle the cylinder safely)

Anyway, just start with Boost and see if it helps. They run out quickly, but nothing beats the convenience.

New cylinders can get a little pricey but used bottles can be found dime-a-dozen on Craigslist/FB Marketplace/etc. Just need to know how to properly inspect a tank. Gas supply stores can get really particular about BYOBottle because of the safety/liability component, but they'll typically treat a no-fill tank as the deposit for a new tank in much the same way consumer propane tank exchange works.

Boost is likely the way to go for OP. I first saw them in Walmart in 2012 as a freshman at a military college. They made the surprise cadre workouts and X mile rucks suck so much less that I'd buy them all up when we were on liberty to sell out of my supply box. Really clever bit of kit, and the mint scent was a nice touch.

Check on alibaba.com...plenty there for under $500.

One of the easiest ways to separate oxygen from nitrogen is to cool it down. Oxygen will condense at around 90K, while nitrogen will stay gaseous until 77K. You need some fairly serious energy input to do this, but it'll be safer than doing electrolysis.

All you need is zeolite crystals and a compressor. Zeolite fixes nitrogen under pressure, so you can use it to separate nitrogen from oxygen. This is how those "oxygen concentrators" work. I'm sure you get can hold of a relatively-cheap chinese one, they don't have dangerous parts or controlled substances. But it wouldn't be that hard to build one from scratch either.

https://www.aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-oxygen-concentrator.h...

> Sorry, your search "oxygen concentrator" did not match any products. Please try again.

i thought it might be because of the /w/wholesale path, so i went to aliexpress (i have an account) and searched on the main page, and it gave the same result. Curiously, "oxygen concentrat" as the search term brings up alleged devices. This dovetails with my very short comment that such devices are hard to find without prescriptions, in the US.

Searching for similar things on amazon only brings up carrying cases and accessories for the "well known" brand(s) of oxygen concentrators. And for some reason both sites show results for these things that blow air in your face for whatever reason...

AliExpress search is kinda wonky, it sometimes just breaks for a bit on specific search terms, or maybe it'll work but only for certain sort orders.

The link is giving search results for me (although admittedly I'm not in the US, so if they're doing any country-specific filtering for US clients I wouldn't know about it).

Wow. Indeed my country was not set to USA. It seems that they do filter the results for USA customers, and researching further suggests that the FDA's position is that they not be used without a prescription. But is it illegal to sell one? Is it illegal to even make one? The situation seems murky. And silly.

I don’t know if this applies on the surface, but divers don’t use pure oxygen on dives because of oxygen toxicity.

Sorry if this is pedantic, but we do actually use it for decompression, though usually no deeper than 20ft.

Ahh good point that I forgot. I certified as a rescue scuba diver but it has been almost 10 years now!

> pure oxygen gets you high. a couple of breaths of pure oxygen will relieve pain and induce euphoria

That is certainly not my experience.

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