The long awaited KISS Manufacturing NanoBooster

I saw the first version of the NanoBooster on last march’s technical dive trip on the Nautilus Explorer. Gordon had brought it along to fill small oxygen bottles from the large cylinders on the boat. For those who don’t know what a booster pump does, here is a short primer.

Commercial gas cylinders come in various sizes, but, depending on the content, most don’t have pressures above 2400 psi. When you are filling a scuba cylinder, you generally want as much volume in the cylinder as possible, if you only fill your rebreathers oxygen tank, say a 13 cf , right off of the commercial cylinder, you will only be able to fill it to the supply cylinders pressure. If it is a full cylinder, you will get just less than 2400 psi, remember you are draining some of the supply cylinder so you cant get the full 2400 psi. You can also set up a cascade system where by you have multiple supply cylinders and fill off of them in order, least full to most full, but this is time consuming and expensive to have this many supply cylinders available. Still you are not using your 3000 psi rated scuba cylinder to its potential. By only having 2400 psi in a 3000 psi rated 13 cf cylinder, you really only have 10.4 cf of oxygen. 2400/3000 = .8 80% of 13cf=10.4cf

So, enter the booster pump. Booster pumps can be of multiple designs. The actual boosting takes place whereby the supply cylinder bleeds into a chamber through a one way valve, so the chamber is now pressurized to the supply cylinder. Now a piston, driven by either an electric motor, manual, muscle driven lever, or a connecting rod from another piston driven by air (this is the NanoBooster method), drives this gas out through another one way valve, increasing its pressure as it does so. Quite simple design. What the NanoBooster does is use a larger piston, being driven by low pressure gas, to drive a much smaller piston in the high pressure chamber. All based on Archimedes leverage principles. The pistons and connecting rod assembly move back and forth, using up low pressure gas to boost high pressure gas to a higher pressure. The NanoBooster is designed to run off of 150 psi of drive gas, fed from a scuba regulator and a normal scuba tank.

What does this mean for the RB diver? Ok lets say your going out for a week trip on a live aboard boat. You plan 3 dives per day, for 6 days, that’s 18 dives of about one hour each, that’s 18 hours of diving. If your breather feeds you 1 litre of oxygen per minute, you will need 1080 liters of oxygen minimum. That’s 38 cubic feet of gas, not very much. If you take one aluminum 80 full of oxygen, only 2400psi if you don’t have a booster pump, that’s only 64 cf really, still enough for the week, right? Not so, read on. So you’re on your 4th day of diving, you have been transfilling from this alum 80 to your 13 cf bottle, topping off after every dive. Your supply cylinder is now down to 1600 psi and now you’re only starting your dive with 7 cf of oxygen. You are going to use up a third of that during your dive, leaving you with very little backup, especially if you depend on your O2 supply as part of your bailout deco strategy. AND THIS IS ONLY THE 4^TH DAY!!!

What do we do, you might ask, well you could bring several alum 80’s to have your own mini cascade, but this is a drag, or a carry, or a haul, and your open circuit buddies will be laughing at you, cant have that. One point of the RB is to lower your equipment weight. Imagine being able to do a whole weeks, or 2 weeks diving off of one alum 80 of oxygen?

Enter the NanoBooster…Now, the suave, smart RB diver carries along another 7 lbs of NanoBooster, in a lovely case, all his friends Oooo and Ahhh over it. You bring the same alum 80 full to 3000 psi, cause you boosted it at home. And every time you fill your RB’s 13cf cylinder, it gets a full 3000 psi too. What could be better? So, you ask, where do I get the gas to power my NanoBooster? Glad you asked, you steal it from your OC buddies of course. They usually come back with a thousand psi or so that they didn’t use, you take that down to 150psi by running your booster. Reduce, reuse, recycle, I always say.

Remember, TANSTAAFL, so there are some limitations. The efficiency of the NanoBooster declines as the supply cylinder pressure gets below 1000 psi. This is because it will take more cycles of the piston to boost the lower pressure to the higher, but with plenty of buddies on the boat, no issue. Boosting can be slow, it will take about 10 minutes of boosting to top a 13cf cylinder from 1000 psi to 3000, but hey, what are surface intervals for anyway?

The NanoBooster is small, lightweight and quite efficient for the quantities the average RB diver is using. If you have need of boosting faster, or more volume, Gordon also makes an electric powered booster, that’s quite a bit heavier and larger. Haskel makes many different models of gas driven booster pumps but expect to dish out at least 4-5 thousand dollars for one.

The NanoBooster also will boost helium mixtures for all you trimix divers out there.

The cost of the NanoBooster is $1200, fill whips are extra. The booster is available from Gordon Smith of KISS manufacturing, he can sell you the whips also, but because of the Canadian exchange rate they are a bit over priced and I know Gordon isn’t making much on them. I will be starting to build whips for his booster also, check back on my whip page for updates.

The Raw booster, hand held size, black coated. Notice the white cylinder at the top of the picture, this is a muffler and quiets the booster down remarkably. Fill whip attachments at the right side.

Here you can see the whips attached and a better idea of size and closer look at the muffler, the muffler works on both strokes, so one could have a conversation nearby, not so with most boosters.

Here is the full kit, in a nice case with the whips and gauge.

This product is an extremely nice add to a RB kit and indispensable on a dive boat. Get yours from gordon@kissmanufacturing.com. He is kinda slow returning emails, cause he would rather build cool stuff, so be patient.