Weird Day of Diving with Petrels

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WetLens

Contributor
Messages
425
Reaction score
374
Location
North Carolina
# of dives
2500 - 4999
I've had my Petrel for 8, going on 9 months now and logged 79 dives/91 hours on it. I had a couple of SAFT batteries left over from another piece of equipment and opted to use them up on both my and my wife's Petrels. Went diving yesterday and knowing I was at the limit of the SAFT battery, checked power the night before and pre-dive. Both showed the battery as full. On descent during the first dive, the battery symbol turned yellow. Ten minutes later the symbol went red; five later and the screen went dead. Not complaining, just noting that Shearwater's comment in the manual that the SAFT can die quickly was an understatement. Dove my backup computer and changed batteries between dives. Made a second dive using the backup. No issues. Again, just an observation.

Second issue showed up on my wife's Petrel. She was running slightly deeper and staying deeper longer than I during both the first and second dive. She was in OC Rec mode; Med conservatism. Towards the end of our second dive, she observed some weird feedback from her Petrel. As she neared 0 NDL, she'd rise a bit in the water column. When she hit ~40', the computer went from 0 to 99 minutes. She dropped a foot and the computer went back to 0; up a foot - 99 minutes. Does anyone else find this strange? Is this just an anomaly in the algorithm? I understand the computer's use of compartments and simulated tissue loading, but it seems a bit extreme for 1 foot to make that kind of difference.

02Jun15 Petrel 2nd Dive.jpg
 
:subscribed:

Interesting about the battery, I use a SAFT also, and have about 60 dives on it since August, so I guess I should start thinking about checking its power before another dive trip.

The NDL readings must be a bug. Looking forward to hearing what others say.

Thanks for sharing.
 
make sure you send that straight to Shearwater if they don't respond to this thread in the next day or two. They are usually good about monitoring this subforum, but you may want to send straight to them so they have an official tracking of it.
 
It may be as simple as dirt on the battery contacts. I have had a battery die quickly only to come back to life after cleaning the contacts on the battery holder.
 
It may be as simple as dirt on the battery contacts. I have had a battery die quickly only to come back to life after cleaning the contacts on the battery holder.

No complaints about battery life or that it went dead - it was due. My observation was that it went from full to off in less than 15 minutes. It died quickly just as their documentation said it would... just didn't expect it to be that quickly as I had zero opportunity to respond. Caution to others more than anything else.
 
Hi WetLens,

Please contact us at support<at> shearwater.com so we can take a look at your wife's dive.

Thank you,
Tyler Coen
Shearwater Research
 
My experience is that standard AA Alkaline is a very good choice and AA Lithium is the best choice as it is the most reliable battery. I don't care about price of Lithium because it is nothing compared to the rest of my technical equipment.
 
Interesting about the battery, I use a SAFT also, and have about 60 dives on it since August, so I guess I should start thinking about checking its power before another dive trip.

Due to the higher water temperature of your dives, the SAFT in your Petrel should last well over 100 hours if you're on automatic brightness.

Usually I swap mine after 100-115 hours of use and they are still showing a full energy bar at that point.
 
The lower hours on mine may be due to the amount of time I've been spending experimenting with different settings. Based on a number of factors, I planned to change to high conservative setting and wanted to fully understand resultant dive profiles for typical coastal NC dives. Again, posted about the quicker than expected interval between full and shutdown for FYI purposes only.

Sending data from my wife's computer now...
 
Watching this with interest.

BTW - is that just a data dump into a graphing/spreadsheet?
 

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