Ping pump crack discovered

OK - I just received the replacement pump and I tried to fasten the battery compartment cover using my fingers only. It's my understanding that for the o-ring to be fully seated there must be no color of the o-ring showing in the crack between the pump body and battery compartment cover. Are you certain that your finger-tighten technique leaves you with a waterproof seal?

I couldn't do it. As I stated above the pump body design precludes grasping the battery cover on opposite sides with the fingers. I used a coin again to fully seat the o-ring. I don't agree that it takes very little pressure to seat the o-ring. Perhaps this is why Animas replaces pumps for this reason with absolutely no push back/education from customer service.

Here's a photo:


I just placed my replacement pump into service. I took special care and notice when replacing the battery cover. See my reply with photo above to a commenter that asserts that only finger-tightening is needed to fully seat the o-ring. I disagree.

The Users Manual on page 16:

"5. Replace the cap by turning clockwise until you cannot see
the o-ring. Then slowly tighten the cap until flush with pump body
. [emphasis mine]"

So it encourages you to bury the o-ring color and tighten some more!

But not too much...

Back to the manual:

"NOTE: Over tightening the battery cap can cause your pump case to crack. Cracks, chips, or damage to your pump may impact the battery contact and/or the waterproof feature of your pump."

(I could never do this with finger pressure. Besides it's not like you can get the index fingertip on one side and the thumb tip on the other.)

If this is such a precise procedure with significant risk of consequent failure, you'd think there'd be a little more cautionary narrative.

As long as Animas doesn't mind replacing, I don't have any problem with this.

Me too. I am so disappointed in Animas. This is now my third Animas pump that has cracked and I’ve been exceptionally careful when tightening the battery cap. I will be going back to minimed after this. Between the cumbersome menu and the lack of ability to trust this cracking won’t continue to happen (with the death alert alarm going off every few minutes and a 30 minute wait time to get any customer support, and then living in Canada having to get support all the way from the US … terrible). I should have stuck with minimed.

I received a replacement pump several years into my warranty. It was manufactured on 04-2014. My pump warranty expired on 04-2015. About a month after the warranty expired, and apparently only a year after the pump’s manufacture date, a crack appeared in the battery compartment. The crack slowly spread until a chunk of the battery compartment fell off. My pump is now being held together by electrical tape. The screen on the pump has also dimmed to the point that it’s unreadable outside of a dimly-lit room. This pump is supposedly only three years old, and it’s the number one reason I have not replaced it with another Animas pump. There is no guarnatee that I will get a new pump every four years. I want whatever pump I get to last for as long as possible. I am not impressed that a pump that’s only three years old has degraded so much (and I am not hard on my pump, not doing any crazy contact sports or anything like that).

Just wondering if your warranty expired two years ago would not your insurance cover a new pump for you?

My current insurance through work only covers one pump per lifetime. So I’m saving it for something really good… I don’t feel like any of the current pumps in Canada (Medtronic 630G, Animas Ping/Vibe, or OmniPod, which I can’t use due to Teflon allergy) are really good. (Plus my insurance refuses to cover CGM, so I’m paying for that out of pocket and the Medtronic CGM would be significantly more expensive than the Dexcom, so that restricts pump choice even more.) I feel like those three pumps are all practically outdated already and that if I go for one of them something awesome like a semi-automated system will come along.