Off NC essentially all my dives are in the 60-105 range. Most of the stuff of interest is in the bottom 20 ft. Second dive is always NDL limited and sometimes the first is also. I always dive Nitrox.
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the major cost in diving for most of us are... air tickets/car rental,hotel accomodation/insurance/food& entertainment/gear & gear rental...
Lots of people do shore dives in south Florida, if you get to 25 ft, you're digging a hole in the sand. No need for Nitrox
We were asked by the regional management about the viability of offering free nitrox. We did the maths and for us it wasn't.
Accounting for filters, electricity and everything we worked out an air fill cost us roughly £1.
Nitrox by the time we refill the Js of O2 and the extra time, tank cleaning and so on we worked out £3.50. That was without the initial outlay for blending panels, valves, replacement O2 sensors and so on.
So 3.5x the cost to us as a business to offer Nitrox vs Air. As the benefits for the customer were exactly zero we didn't bother.
you're probably younger than me.I routinely do 4-5 dives a day. It's my job. You plan the profiles and day properly and rarely if ever come up against an NDL.
Holidays generally i'll do 5 or 6 dives a day on a liveaboard, all on air and never have an issue.
From experience most guided dives (90%+ if not more worldwide) end due to air consumption not NDLs. For these cases there is absolutely no benefit at all in paying extra for nitrox.
no need to have a tank to do 25 ft, just a snorkelLots of people do shore dives in south Florida, if you get to 25 ft, you're digging a hole in the sand. No need for Nitrox
i did 10 dives in may.Just looked through my logs for 2013. I did 550 dives and used nitrox on 7 of those dives. All on the same dive site. Pretty much sums it up - needed only in very specific circumstances.
Quite a few of my clubmates claim the same, and also that the difference has become more pronounced through upper middle age (i.e. approaching or past the big five-oh). I'd love to know if there are any systematic studies on this.I think diving with nitrox leaves me less fatigued than diving on air.