Look for four things: how many sessions it can run in a day, who it can take, how quickly it gets fixed when something goes wrong, and the room it needs. A commercial hyperbaric chamber is the same hard-shell vessel that goes into a home. What changes is the order of priorities, because a practice runs sessions back to back for different people all day.
This page is for clinics, practices and operators. If you want the equipment fundamentals first, the hard-shell chamber guide covers the vessel, the pressure range and the two oxygen systems.
What actually changes in a commercial specification?
Three things move to the top, and one thing drops down.
Throughput moves up. A home chamber is used once a day by the same person. A practice chamber might run six or eight sessions, which makes the time between them, and how quickly the cabin resets, a real number rather than a detail.
Access moves up. Different people, different mobility. A sit-up cabin and a lay-down cabin are not interchangeable when you do not control who is booking.
Service response moves up. A chamber that is down in a home is an inconvenience. A chamber that is down in a practice is a day of cancelled bookings.
Interior finish drops down. It still matters, but it stops being the thing you optimise for.
Monoplace or walk-in?
Most of the range is monoplace: one person per session, in a sealed cabin. Atlas One is sit-up and Altura One is lay-down, and both run to 2.0 ATA.
The HPOTech Atlantis is a walk-in multiplace option, built for two people at once. That is a genuinely different proposition for a practice: it halves the number of sessions needed to serve the same number of people, and it changes the room you need to put it in. OneBase London also has a two-seater configuration available, and among the HQ chambers, Aurora seats one or two and Solaris Duo seats two.
For most practices starting out, a monoplace cabin is the right first chamber and the walk-in is the question you revisit once you know your booking pattern. The full range has the formats in between.
Which oxygen system should a practice specify?
On Atlas One, Altura One, Aurora and Solaris, both systems are available, and this is the decision worth the most attention. OneBase London and the HPOTech chambers include Advanced Oxygen as standard.
Standard Oxygen is continuous flow through a mask or headset, depending on the chamber, running the whole session. It ships as standard on those four.
Advanced Oxygen is BIBS, inhale-activated, routing exhaled breath out of the cabin rather than into it. BIBS explained covers the system, and the continuous flow vs BIBS entity page sets them side by side.
It is specified at order and cannot be retrofitted. In a home that is a decision you live with. In a practice it is a decision you live with in front of everyone who books, which is why we work through it on a call rather than letting a spec sheet decide it.
What does installation actually include?
Delivery, professional installation and commissioning, operator training, and a 2-year warranty. Install and service are AU-wide, including Queensland, Western Australia, New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia. Tight entry, crane access and complex logistics are quoted separately.
Lead time moves with the chamber and the configuration. As a planning guide, Atlas One and Aurora run approximately 12 weeks, Altura One approximately 15 weeks to install, OneBase London is a 20-week build to order, and the HPOTech chambers are built to order in Europe over four to six months. Your quote confirms the figure for your build, so plan against these and commit against the quote.
Operator training is the part worth flagging for a practice specifically. Whoever runs sessions needs to be able to run them without calling us, and that is what the training visit is for. Train more than one person if you can. A single trained operator is a scheduling constraint disguised as a saving, and it becomes obvious the first time they take leave.
Commissioning is worth understanding too. It is not unpacking. The chamber is placed, connected, brought up to pressure and checked before anyone books a session on it.
Does a soft-shell have a place in a practice?
Sometimes, as a second cabin rather than a first one. It cannot reach 2.0 ATA and it does not take Advanced Oxygen, so it is not a substitute for the hard-shell you build the room around. What it can do is add capacity without a second fit-out, and move between rooms as your booking pattern changes.
The hard-shell versus soft-shell comparison sets the two formats against each other properly. For a practice the short version is that the soft-shell is a flexibility purchase, not a capability one.
What to ask before you specify
Five questions decide the configuration, and four of them are not about the chamber:
- How many sessions a day, at what length? This is the number that decides monoplace versus walk-in, and it is the one most practices have not written down.
- Who is booking? Mobility across your actual bookings decides sit-up versus lay-down, and it is not a preference question.
- Who operates it? Training goes to a person, and that person needs to be there on install day.
- What happens when it is down? Agree the service path before you need it, not after.
- Standard or Advanced Oxygen? The only one on the list that cannot be revisited later.
What does the room need to take?
A hard-shell chamber is a permanent occupant. Atlas One occupies 0.89 by 2.00 m of floor and Altura One 0.90 by 2.20 m, before the clearance you need around them, and the walk-in formats are larger again.
For a practice there is a second question a home buyer never asks: where does the person waiting sit, and does the room the chamber lives in have to be the room they wait in. Planning the room covers the measuring, and we confirm the layout and the delivery route before anything ships.
How does throughput change what you buy?
Work backwards from sessions, not from the chamber.
A monoplace cabin serves one person per session. Add the time to get in, the pressure ramp, the session itself, the ramp back down and the reset, and you have the real slot length, which is longer than the time at pressure. Multiply that by your opening hours and you have the ceiling on what one cabin can do in a day.
If that ceiling is above your booking pattern, one monoplace chamber is the right purchase and a second one is a question for later. If it is below, you are choosing between a second cabin and a walk-in, and the walk-in is usually the better answer because it needs one room rather than two.
That is the whole calculation, and it is worth doing on paper before looking at a single specification. Practices that skip it tend to buy the chamber they liked and discover the constraint afterwards.
What does a commercial chamber cost?
Hardware from AUD 78,900 — delivered & installed, for the entry hard-shell, Atlas One. Altura One starts from AUD 99,900, Solaris Mono from AUD 111,900, Aurora from AUD 149,900 and Solaris Duo from AUD 159,900.
OneBase London, the HPOTech Zeugma and Atlantis, and the Magna walk-in are priced on quote, each build specified with you on a call, so there is no list figure here. Upgrades on any chamber are confirmed in your custom quote.
The spread across that range is wide enough that the useful conversation is not about price, it is about how many sessions a day you expect to run and who will be in them. That is the call.
