Seal Easy Masks

[Bob Willard]

Is anyone else using Seal Easy Masks?  We ordererd 40-50 of them this year and so far are seeing that about 1 in 4 are defective.  I just want to see if this is an isolated case or if anyone else is experiencing this problem as well.

[Nick Bacon]

Bob,

We just received a shipment of 75 masks from Water Safety Products, but haven't opened any of them yet. We will be issuing 20 of them to a Lifeguard class later this week so I'll have an answer for you by next week at the latest. What exactly is the defect?

[Cara Calkins]

Right off the bat we noticed a discoloration in the last shipment we received, they had a very aged look and seemed to have a similar problem of many brand new masks being defective. If it was 1 in 4 or 1 in 2 I couldn't tell you off the top of my head, but there may be something awry.

[Bob Willard]

Thanks for the responses. Nick-We are experiencing a little bit of everything. We have seal in the mask that are failing, the inlet to inflate them are bad on some of them and some have had a big tear in them like they blew out. Every class we have more and more go bad.

Are you both Ellis and Associates facilities? I assume you are if you are using Seal Easy masks.

[Cara Calkins]

We've had similar issues, the "blow out" tear around the inside seam on the bottom has been most common....and YES we are and EA facility. :)

[Nick Bacon]

I'll check with my lead LGI on the current class to see if she notices any issues with the masks she issues tonight, she has a 21 student class so that should be a big enough sample size to see any problems. We are not an Ellis facility, but we have several in-house protocols that we have developed borrowing from Ellis and a few other certifying agencies. Both my predecessor and I prefer the collaborative approach when it comes to developing procedures :)

[Bob Willard]

Sounds good Nick. Looking forward to hearing about your experience.

[Nick Bacon]

Bob, of the 20 we issued only one came back as defective. The air bag was yellow, almost as if it we really aged, and there was an air leak where the bag is wrapped around the stem for the one-way valve. Otherwise all the others worked fine. We do have 55 more in the order that haven't been checked yet....

[Bob Willard]

You are lucky. We are still dealing with this. Every class it seems like lose another 1 or 2 masks.

[Elise]

In 2009, we had a bad run with our Seal Easy masks. They were weak at the point where the neck met the donut. (how's that for technical?) This past year, they were fine. We get ours from Kiefer's stockpile. Has the Seal Easy manufacturor made any comment to you?

[Bob Willard]

Hopefully this year was just a bad year. In all I think we had close to 2 dozen go bad on us. Very unusual.

[Elise]

I sent a reference of this discussion out to the company... I see that they have not gotten around to any formal comments yet!

hmmm?

[Bob Willard]

Great idea! Too bad they were not responsive.