Fellow mouth taper here! It’s a must for shared hotel rooms. I have no idea about the safety or effectiveness for sleep apnea, but it significantly (N=1) improves others’ sleep.
CPAP user here. I tape my mouth. The risk of suffocating due to a blocked nose seems low to me, for two reasons. First, because I can simply do a one-sided smile and breathe normally through my mouth -- I've tried many times for funsies and it's never failed. Second, because you should always fold the two bottom corners of the tape to facilitate its quick removal in the morning anyway.
The real risk of taping your mouth at night, in my opinion, is if there's any chance of vomiting. Without any other way to go, you would aspirate the vomit and that's bad. What I do to reduce that risk is not eating for three hours before using the CPAP.
So why go through all that effort when one could simply use a full face CPAP mask? That's because it is difficult to produce an airtight seal around your whole face, which is necessary for CPAP therapy to work. Creating a seal around your nose is much easier and the smaller size of a nasal nask allows you to sleep on your side, which for most people means you can get away with using lower pressures, which in turn are more comfortable.
Among other reasons this can happen because CPAP therapy can cause you to swallow air unwittingly while you sleep due to the pressure it places on your epiglottis. The subsequent burps can contain a mixture of swallowed air and the contents of your stomach.
Or, you know, I may be speaking from personal experience.
Guess they're just covering their arse with that advice.
Also, when you're on nasal CPAP, and pressurised air is being blown into your nose, you'd have to have really weird things happening to suddenly get a nose that's completely obstructed in spite of the pressure....
I personally use:
- better breath strips from aliexpress
- a 3D print similar to https://noson.eu/