Breathing Air Cascade System 4-Bottle

These are used for the storage of pure breathing air used to fill Fire Department self contained breathing apparatus referred to as SCBA. Filling of the cascade storage is obtained from your pure breathing air compressor. SCBA comes in two popular pressure ratings, 2216psi and 4500psi, and there is some manufacturers offering 5500psi units.

Cascade storage systems come in three pressures as well: 4500psi, 5000psi and 6000psi. And it is recommended that your storage system has a higher pressure than your SCBA pressures. If purchasing a new storage system it is recommended you purchase the 6000psi system so you are ready for any upgrades in your compressor or SCBA in the future. This allows you to fill from the lowest pressure cascade bottle and by leveling out the pressure in your SCBA’s you close and open the next highest cascade bottle until your SCBA’s are topped off to the correct full pressure.

These pre-packaged systems do not come with the regulator, wall bracket or fill whips as most departments have a NFPA approved fragmentation or fill station to protect the fire fighter during the refilling of their SCBA in case of a failure and only require a high pressure hose to supply the air from the compressor to the storage bank and from this bank to the fill station and these are made to each departments requirements.

Please note that the systems below are examples and there is no limit to how many storage bottles you can have on your cascade system.

We have also included a chart below to give you an example of how many fills you can obtain from your storage system before you need to rely on your compressor to top up your SCBA. As you can see storage is critical during an emergency on how may SCBA bottles you will be able to fill. We have eliminated the part of the chart which shows bulk fills as this is not an efficient way to use your air storage.

Fills from Storage

Instructions:

1. Select the type of BA cylinder to be filled from top of the chart.
2. Find the fill method and desired number of storage vessels in the left column.
3. Select the starting pressure of DOT storage, either 5,000 or 6,000 psi.
4. Intersect the cylinder type with the number of storage vessels to determine number of cylinder fills and RF. Residual Factor (RF) represents residual storage volume which may be utilized in conjunction with a compressor to fill BA cylinders when storage pressure alone is insufficient to fill the cylinders to capacity. By adding compressor cylinders filled per hour, cylinders filled from storage, and RF the maximum number of cylinders filled from a complete air system may be determined.