Am I paranoid to consider analyzing recreational air?

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dive_turkey

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Location
Utah
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25 - 49
Are there any recreational divers out there that analyze their air before diving? I've read enough accident reports and "close calls" where tech divers have discovered their tanks contain the wrong mixture. Is it possible for a recreational diver to walk out of a dive shop with a bottle of oxygen or nitrox? I know the tanks are supposed to be labeled, and I'm sure the shops take all the precautions in the world possible... but does it happen?

Anyone here ever come across a recreational diver that was either found to have been breathing the wrong air, or maybe had a close call? Perhaps I've just been reading too many scary scuba stories...
 
If you are asking the question, you already know the answer.

You are sucking on something at however deep you are that is in complete control of your life. It's in your best interest to know what it is.

I didn't analyze as a basic ow diver, only because I didn't know what I didn't know. Now I do. Every single tank gets the analyzer before the regs go on.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk - now Free
 
In diving you can never be too careful.
I have personally witnessed an “air” tank be filled with 36% Nitrox. There are reports of this happening, bad air from various places, and a host of other issues. It takes so little time to check the gas in your tank, it should become a part of every diver’s routine. If nothing else, it builds a solid foundation and routine for as your dive career progresses to Nitrox or mixed gas diving.
 
Thank you for confirming my suspicions.

Now, who can recommend a solid analyzer for my applications?
-Luke
 
I'm building an El Cheapo for myself and a couple others.

If you are interested, I can add you to the list for the next batch.
 
Depends what you're testing for, where the tank was filled, and what you'll do with the gas.

CO? How likely you are to get any of it turns largely on where the tank was filled, but it's pretty nasty stuff and it has turned up even in more first-world locales... I'd say that's a justifiable level of paranoia, assuming you can afford the cost of the tester and 3-4 yr sensor replacement cycle. If you're not diving the third-world and have a reputable shop, you're probably just fine not testing for CO, too, just like thousands and thousands of divers do every day without incident. That said, the deeper you go, the more CO can affect you... if you're routinely taking your tanks down past 100' and staying there for a while, I'd say testing for CO is getting up towards a mandatory safety precaution.

O2? If there's no way your shop could possibly add O2 or He to a tank and they don't contract out fills, you can safely assume an air fill is actually air. However, as someone pointed out earlier, most shops don't check what's in a rental tank that's been returned... if someone rented it, filled it with EAN36 and then returned it half full after a short dive, you could have a real surprise on a deep dive. If the shop only does mix by partial pressure blending, you could possibly get a mix in a regular, unmarked, not-O2 clean tank...but economics and safety considerations make it seemingly unlikely. Still, people have gotten rich mixes, hypoxic mixes, and even 100% Helium fills from such operations, all of which can kill you dead if you treat them like air on the wrong dive (or on any dive, for the 100% HE/0% O2 tank). Finally, places with banked nitrox are at least seemingly the greatest chance for a screw up... monkey pulls the wrong valve, monkey fills the wrong tank, etc. O2 clean requirements aren't applicable, which makes filling any old tank with nitrox NBFD. Still, unless you're going deep, getting some banked 28, 32, or 36 probably won't hurt you at all. If you're going to 130', much less a 200' air dive where even 23 or 24% O2 would be a terrible idea, you should probably make sure your air is actually air.
 
https://www.shearwater.com/products/peregrine/

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