How long do gas masks really last?

okay I wanted to do a video today on how long do gas masks really last because this is one of those things where people argue about this constantly online and I think the worst offenders of this a certain Preppers blocks and like Preppers YouTube channels and I have nothing against Preppers of course but it's where obviously they want to keep making videos or writing articles so they delve into stuff they've not got a massive you know a lot of knowledge on but then proclaim it to be facts now there's an interesting kind of fallacy or effect and it's called the dunning-kruger effect and what that is is basically where the dumber somebody is the more they think they know and that's kind of an oversimplification of it it's more like knowledge on a certain subject and the dunning-kruger effect is a bit odd because it sort of says let's say you've got somebody on the very far left of your graph that's got absolutely no knowledge in something and then on the far side you've got somebody who's a total expert what you'll find is somebody who has absolutely no knowledge on the subject won't claim to have any expertise in it but actually happens is somebody who has a slightest bit of knowledge in it let's say 5% of available knowledge or less they're certainly at the top thinking they know everything about a subject and then as the graph goes up to people who are more knowledgeable they're actual you know confidence and their own ability goes down until you get to the experts where it goes back up and that's basically the problem that people who are knowledgeable on the subject don't want to sound full of themselves and you know trying to spout information on it but people who don't actually know much about that subject but read the slight is maybe a Wikipedia article and read a paragraph on this subject suddenly think oh I know everything about it so this is one of the things I think that really plagues some of the prepping um sort of gas masks and respirator information is that people who don't really have any experience with masks but read a little bit about them think they now have the authority to write an informative blog article or something and then they give lots of misinformation out so what authority do I have to counter that in this video well I've got like 70 odd gas masks in my collection respirators I find respirators absolutely fascinating so I've done a fair bit of search into them again that doesn't mean I am CBRN trained specialist but I think I have enough information to be able to spot when they say things that are totally false now getting onto the subject of the video before I get too sidetracked the point of this video is sort of all about how long do the masks actually last compared to what you read online now the problem is I've said before in lots of other videos you only seem to get two fields of thought you get the field of thought that only masks within like five years old or something it useful anything ever mask is immediately garbage it won't work everything fails on the mask and then you get the other school of four where it's basically masks never expire nothing can ever go wrong with the masks and filters lasts forever and that field of four is also equally as wrong the problem with masks is they basically have a factory guarantee and that can be anywhere between about five and 20 years depending on how much confidence the company has in their masks most of the Israeli masks from what I've read it guaranteed for at least ten to twenty years Avon guarantees most their masks for 20 years because they obviously make good quality masks and they know their master gonna stand up to you know about two decades of use so you have the companies that put these sort of guarantees on the mask and it's no different than if you buy a product from a shop and it says it's got one year to year for guarantees that kind of thing Bob see as you'll know lots of products do last longer than that some products products would even make it to the guarantee period but that's alright you can at least get a replacement or whatever and then some products tend to go wrong like a day after the guarantee and I think some people seem to equate like cheap electrical goods with a respirator and assuming they work in exactly the same weight when they really don't so what I wanted to do in this video is kind of explain the logic of how a respirator can go wrong again I will have talked about this in other videos but I don't think I've done a video specifically on this where I go into as much detail so we're going to look at you know how old respirators can be before they fail what might go wrong on them and all that sort of thing so that start off with our first respirator okay so I have here is my British light anti gas respirator mark 1 also known as mark 6 gas mask and this respirator is dated 1940 Ford is from January 1944 so this mask is very very old but guess what it still actually works this is the oldest mask in my collection I've actually tested and I can guarantee that it works I've got some other older ones that probably would work as well you know I've got no inclination of testing them because they have asked best sauce filters on now a respirator itself is very simple basically the job of a respirator at least a full-face air purifying respirator is to protect your eyes protect your obviously face and to protect your lungs and you know insights from inhaling or ingesting chemicals so how that mask works is obviously the glass plastic wire eyepieces protect your eyes when the mask is on and when you have a filter on it and the filter is a really important thing we're gonna have to keep coming back to because this is what a lot of prep is and things don't seem to take into consideration the filter being the most important part of a mask because if there's no filter nothing else will work but with a mask there's lots of other features we you know some us have some arse don't and they still work fine so you'd have your filter on there and what your filter does this isn't a sixty millimeter fill to the mass takes but I can use it as an example see the filter cleans the air that goes through it so any sort of nasties get trapped in the filter I've done entire videos on filters so I'm not gonna get really in-depth on filters in this video but regardless all the nasties get stuck inside the filter the purified air goes through and goes into the mask and as you can see here there's a valve here and where the exhale valve is by air comes out the mask there is a valve there that's really all there is to a respirator it's simply basically a piece of rubber that you normally have on your face now you can see how of and you have a filter that cleans the air coming in and the bag or the mask or whatever itself the job of it is to simply you know have valves at work so over air can't get in it has to go through the circuit of going through a filter so mask themselves are very simple there's very little that can actually go wrong now as you add more features onto a mask or says more to go wrong if you have a voice diaphragm often voiced diaphragm come weakest part of the mask if they rip tear whatever your mask is compromised so there's this kind of stupid logic I see a lot in the prepping stuff where they're saying that if you have a mask that is beyond a certain amount years old the mask is totally useless and won't work for example I've tested this mask it still works but I want to trust my life on the masks like this no I have much better masks in my collection it would work better than this mask in terms of being more comfortable to wear you know take more modern filters and everything else but regardless old masks if they've been kept in good conditions can still work so a big facts you need to think about what mask is actually the quality of the mask itself if it's a really well-made mask then not much is going to go wrong with it if it's kept in good conditions you know there's only like an intake an outtake valve that can actually fail you'll be in the weakest parts of masks then the chances are those failing a pretty low now with these masks the actual intake valves and everything are cut from fairly thick rubber you see one of the valves there the other valve is that yellow one sort of pale yellow white one on the inside so those vowels are fairly strong so as long as this mask was kept out of direct sunlight maybe in a bag where it wasn't crushed into the back you know the mask didn't have to be folded down because masks are folded for too long get damaged nothing's really gonna go wrong with it now I'm sure you know from obviously lots of news or coverage on stuff like this is that there's lots of waste in landfills that takes like hundreds of thousands of years to break down which is a big problem like lots of plastics and rubbers because we make so much of it so much gets thrown away and then it you know just pollutes the earth because it takes so long to break down masks and basically mostly made from those materials so they're not gonna you know just suddenly break when there's not a time bomb in the mask for it says all I'm out my guaranteed bank so those guarantees are in place simply because militaries and people who need a mask for their job cannot risk having a mass that's going to fail on them so the idea is that they have masks for very short time periods and then they you know having you stop constantly coming in and lots of that is also very much military industrial complex kind of stuff and you know just keeping people in work if you're a mask manufacturer you don't want people to put in a big order of masks you know once and then that's it you want them to keeping in repeat orders when their stuff is coming to the end of its guarantee now different mask manufacturers as I was saying definitely give you different amounts of sort of estimates on how long masks last for examples are saying Avon guarantees most no masks for about 20 years where some some company like free em only guarantees them for five years but I have free of masks one of my free and masks is from the 1990s I use it when I actually encounter dust it's just a half face respirator I sure got it here this particular master filters are newer but the mask itself is much much older I have feeling it was from the 1990s because I boy this new old stock because it ended up being like a quarter of the price to buy a new old stock mass than it was to buy a brand new one and the mask is still in perfect condition works perfectly and it's got new filters on so you know nothing really looking to go wrong so as I was saying the thing is with these masks is that it's mostly down to how well they're kept and the quality of the manufactured goods but as I was saying free em only guarantees their master five years ayoung guarantees s for 20 so if you were gonna buy a surplus mask and there were two about the same price you probably over the Avon one but regardless masks don't just fail overnight which is an important concept to understand masks themselves as I saying very little can go wrong on them so what you actually need to start thinking about more is your filters here's an Israeli civilian last technically to show um for a one a very popular mask on the surplus market often you can get these like twenty to thirty pounds or dollars each now as I say these are very very good masks Israel makes them for their civilian population and Israel does have a very real fear of chemical weapons or biological weapons whatever house being used against them cinemas actually have to work these aren't you know like one of those I will make them just in case something happened there's a very real fear with Israel that you know there would actually be chemical weapons used against them so no masks have to now these masks I said can often be found very cheaply on the surplus market but you'll find numerous websites that say these are absolute junk won't work firstly why would Israeli few absolute junk that our own people obviously they want them to live if they're going to offer you know manufacturing mastan's then spending a fair bit of money to do it so why would they manufacture junk that's gonna fail really quickly and you know what authority do these places have to say that these are junk now you have kind of two things here as I saying you have the sort of I guess prepper bloggers who don't know any better that just regurgitate this information but lots of disinformation you'll find while they say that certain masks will go wrong very quickly is actually from sites trying to sell you newer masks and there's always this kind of problem you know of conflict of interest I'd say when you come to look at lots of respirator information because generally people who are trying to sell you something and I have to mention this over and over again when it comes to gp5 filters and other asbestos filters people who are trying to sell you something probably you know I'm not going to give you the entire truth about a product or might have a bit of a bias when it comes to trying to make a sale so if you're somebody who only stocks very new respirators and doesn't keep surplus Eunos doesn't sell surplus stuff on the side you are probably going to say that you know masks that aren't the ones you sell won't work which you know is a load of BS but lots of sellers do it so I said Israeli civilian masks are very good but the important thing we have to you know take note of is the filter now obviously filters as I was saying it's a very important part of a respirator and you do need in date filters in my opinion now as I said again this is another fallacy the kind of problems that come in with filters is the filters a guaranteed again like masks for a certain lifespan and basically what most manufacturers say is the filter life is indefinite indefinite it's not the same as infinite what indefinite means is if the filter is still plugged up after they expires you know technically expires by the date on the filter that says it expires or ten years after manufacturing date when see or whatever however leader its it's like a best before date on food basically so it's what they're saying is the filter may work after this period but we cannot guarantee it and they are definitely true when they say that because filters have activated charcoal when they have a particular filter but the particulate filter doesn't ever really expire unless you damage it and that charcoal filter inside is impregnated of various other chemicals to make it work more efficiently now activated carbon definitely does expire even if you look at people who make activated carbon products for pharmaceutical kind of stuff basically say yes are activated charcoal has an indefinite shelf life we have to put an expiration date on it by law but it will eventually go off and we have no idea exactly when so activated charcoal inside the filters definitely does go off now an interesting example I've got this is when I got on a Chinese tf1 respirator it came with this Chinese filter that's filled with activated charcoal you can actually see the charcoal inside if the camera will focus on it there now interestingly I assume the expiration date for this filter is 2017 10 that's on there hopefully you can see that somewhere but the interesting thing is that despite this filter only being expired by a few months by the time I'm making this video it absolutely does not work at all it is totally expired now whereas I've got filters like this that are about 10 years old that still work when I test them against chemicals so not all filters are made equal and it's one to understand it also depends on the quality of like the caps and things that you plug the filter with filters exposed to actual like room air are gonna run out far faster than filters that are still sealed you know with factory seals if it's airtight nothing's getting in which means that feel just gonna last a lot longer but again not forever whereas this filter came with no plugs on it at all and it's already expired so this is a lot about just leaving a filter unplugged in my opinion and said there's no guaranteed life once the filters expired there's no guarantee of how long it's going to last so you really have to bear that in mind now one of the really stupid bits of logic I see on a lot of these prep vlogs is where they basically say if you buy a surplus gas mask it will come with an expired filter therefore the mask is useless oh it's only useless if you don't replace the filter now using that logic can you buy a brand new gas mask and it just not come with a filter at all because obviously there's a big market for being able to buy filters for masks these masks are designed to be reusable they're not designed that you go oh my foot was expired two hundred chapters in the bin and buy a whole new mask but weirdly a lot of people seem to have this logic you only really have to throw masks away if it's been exposed to horrible chemical agents being damaged or you can't really decontaminate it you know once if you have your mask sitting somewhere ready for an emergency in a load of filters you don't have to chop my mask away as soon as you've not got filters for it it's just this is bizarro logic I don't really understand it but basically a lot of people don't seem to understand the concept that you might be able to buy a surplus mask in good condition it has an expired filter and then just buy a replacement filter for it it's a very very old piece of logic but that's what a lot of these bloggers use is they say now if you buy an old surplus mask it comes with an expired filter therefore the mask is useless most only use isn't who you buy a replacement filter if you buy your brand new let's say respirator that cost you $300 and it comes with one filter and then you know within a year of you owning it that filters dates run out would you then just check away that Mouse and say oh it's useless now because my filters run out me just buy new filters for it you know it's like if you bought a Brita jug and you said wow I can't get this on you old stock of a Brita joke I have to buy a brand new Brita joke because otherwise the filters of the British ugh are expired you could just buy new filters for a Brita jug but regardless my point here is that yes the mask is only as good as the filter to be certain but you can buy filters separately from the masks that's not really an issue but some reason it gets brought up a lot in these people trying to convince you you know that these masks useless because I was simply to say if the mask comes with an expired filter therefore the mask is useless now as long as you can replace the filter the mask is fine as long as the mask works now I think a lot of this comes down to like the sunk cost fallacy and what the sunk cost fallacy is basically let's say I buy something and it cost me a lot of money I'm them probably because of how irrational humans are going to defend that product non-stop even if it's you know useless now I'm certainly not saying these armed expensive new mouths so useless they are probably very good but the issue is that let's say you could buy a mouse that will give you the equal amount of protection for $30 a month at will cost three hundred dollars one cost you ten times as much as the other one if you buy at three hundred dollar mask and then found out you could have spent thirty dollars for something that will give me the exact same physical level of protection you're probably gonna start making irrational defenses of the more expensive product that sort of what the sunk cost fallacy is so you're going to start saying well you know the protection level is just so much better and the old mask can't work because xxx reason you know that's basically the sunk cost fallacy that you're making irrational arguments for some think that cost more and you're saying it's better simply on the ground it cost more so using that logic if I for some reason there was a place that just wanted to get rid of a load of stock and new respirators they're not even surplus ones and they charge less would you then say that mass now become useless because it doesn't cost very much it's as I said it's a sort of fallacious or biased way of thinking that's not a good way of actually thinking about these things so as I said you've got some places where they say old mouths don't work because they're trying to sell you brand new masks and they want to make a big you know load of money off of those masks so it's in their interest to say don't buy that cheaper product that will work only our product will work it'd be basically like if you everybody thought you had to buy a stretch limo or some sort of luxury car because a regular hatchback couldn't get you from A to B it's that kind of logic you know rather than selling the better product some what makes it better they've got a better voice diaphragm there's out drinking tubes on it you know all that sort of stuff and they try and actually rubbish the other person's product rather than actually explaining the positives of that product till they do both but um that's kinda logic and I say a big problem as why always people never seem to take the filters into as much account as they should as I said as I said you know filters are really the most important part of a mask if you've got a brand new really great Mouse but you've not got a good filter to put on it the masks useless whereas as long as you've got a good filter and you've got a working you know really old master or at least take the filter that's going to protect you so that's where all these problems come in so how long do masks really last they last as long as their weakest component is going to last and if they're kept in good conditions that will be indefinitely for some masks I think it would be a hundred years and I have a feeling this mask as long as I keep it in good condition would outlive me in terms of the rubber seals and everything still functioning I'm sure one of my organs would have horribly failed by the you know well before that mask is gonna fail that's just simple logic because very simple parts that are made well aren't end to fail very easily there's not much that can go wrong with the mask that's the interesting thing especially not older surplus masks because an old master don't have voiced diaphragms on as well you know they just have a couple of rubber vowels for the intake an outtake there's not much you can do wrong with them as long as you keep them in good conditions so hopefully that's answered the question but yeah and if you are a prepper please do your research into respirators before actually making lots of these claims because some people might waste a load of money by you know believing what you say or you might get people killed if you don't stress the importance enough of filters but you do stress wasting all your money on a really good high-quality new Mouse but they're not getting any spare filters for it as I've said quite a few times the best logic really is to buy surplus masks you know is in good condition and you're comfortable of using that fits you properly then use most of your other budget to buy filters make sure you keep most of your filters sealed you know in date that you have somewhere where they're convenient to get to so you can use them and then maybe have one or two old filters that even if they're expired work as a training filter so you know how to sort out filters and stuff like that the masks that I said here is a mask from 70 odd years ago and it still works absolutely fine so that's the kind of you know logic here you can have something as old as this that might still protect you as long as you've got filters for it and I think that does go a long way to explain that you know it's a very bad argument to make that just because of ask is old it's guaranteed to be junk you

Channel: Weaponsandstuff93

Views: 19,038

Rating: 4.9637303 out of 5

Keywords: weapons and stuff 93, Weaponsandstuff93, gas mask, respirator, surplus gas mask, NBC mask, CBRN mask, real gas mask, air filter, breathing filter, How long do gas masks really last?, obsolete gas mask, expired gas mask, expired respirator, army surplus

Id: 52vMlhh7YLU

Length: 22min 16sec (1336 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 19 2018