Is the Helios Liquid Oxygen system as good as it sounds?!

Is the Helios Liquid Oxygen system as good as it sounds?

My aunt is pretty much confined to her home b/c her O2 bottles are too heavy for her to manage. The Helios portable liquid o2 system looks great - small, lightweight, quiet, and covered by insurance/medicare. She'll ask her dr abt it at her appointment next week but I hoped to find someone out there with personal experience.

Thanks!

I had a Helios and it was expensive, cumbersome (large storage tank in your home), the portable unit froze up all the time, hard to fill, just a royal pain in the you-know-what. If your aunt isn't really strong, she may have difficulty filling the portable unit. It takes some effort to do.

I switched to smaller bottles (my oxygen supply company delivers them to my home) and use a "conserving device" on the small bottles. It has a "pulse" setting on it that only dispenses oxygen when I inhale, instead of a constant pressure like some regulators. It will adjust all the way to 6 liters/minute. It acts like the Helios, but I don't have the big tank of liquid O2 in my home, and I don't have to worry about the oxygen seeping out of the portable unit.

There are other units available that combine a concentrator with a portable bottle. They take room air, concentrate and compress it, and it fills a smaller portable bottle. They are expensive ($3,000 to $5,000), but definitely something to look at. If you go to the following web site, you will get a totally independent look at all portable oxygen equipment. It is worth checking out before committing to a system like the Helios. Hope this helps a bit. Good luck to you and your aunt.

http://www.portableoxygen.org/