please help

I have a AirSense 10 machine that reports to my I phone . Every night my mask seal reports are awful. I have tried both Nasal and Full face masks ( several different types) my leak scores are always 10 or less out of Twenty. My machine shows that the seal is good , I know I’m a mouth breather, I assume that is the leakage problem. The good news is that my apnea’s are controlled. I range between 0.8 and 2.5 events an hour. My question is , being that my apnea’s are controlled , should I stop agonizing about these mask leak scores ? Thanks

Welcome to the forum.

My personal experience is that the machine happy face is not very critical. Only once in 6 months have I seen the red unhappy face. When I checked the actual leakage rates with SleepyHead, it was terrible. You get the happy face if 70% of your night is below 24 L/min leak rate. That is pretty high leakage. If you enable the more detailed reporting on the ResMed machine you can get an actual leakage rate number. It gives you the 95% leak rate number. Ideally you want it under 15 l/min. See page 19 of this technical manual for more information on the detailed report numbers. To enable the more detailed report, if it is not enabled now, you need to go into the clinical menu. To do that push the home button and round Set button together for 5 seconds. This will bring up the clinical menu option. It works the same as the user menu. Go into it, and scroll down to the Options section, and the first item should be Essentials, press on it, and set it to Plus instead of On. Press the Home key and exit out of the clinical menu. The more detailed sleep report should now be available to you. You can set the time interval that it averages readings over from 1 day to 1 year.

As far as opening your mouth during the night, I have that issue and have solved it by using tape on my mouth. I think there are advantages to doing that, and it is way more comfortable than it sounds. See this video:

Mouth Taping for a Better Sleep

In short, if your AHI is nice and low, like yours is, and you are sleeping happily, then don't get too hung up on leak measurements.