Alarm over shop's high Carbon Monoxide levels - Victoria, Australia

Please register or login

Welcome to ScubaBoard, the world's largest scuba diving community. Registration is not required to read the forums, but we encourage you to join. Joining has its benefits and enables you to participate in the discussions.

Benefits of registering include

  • Ability to post and comment on topics and discussions.
  • A Free photo gallery to share your dive photos with the world.
  • You can make this box go away

Joining is quick and easy. Log in or Register now!

That's a fair point. I myself dismissed the first time this happened to me as "I'm probably dehydrated." But not the second time....
I remember a Belize group trip with a lousy local op, when all of the air divers got sick the first day, while we Nitrox divers who got their tanks provided from another operator were fine. I suspect that the op drained tanks and cleaned their compressor after so many near hits.
 
The last time I had an issue was back in the mid-90s when tanks from a well-known shop at a famous destination always had a "taste" and gave me a headache.

A buddy and I got a taste at 30', nothing before, aborted the dive. Back at the shop we found out the compressor malfunction was discovered after we left and was being rebuilt. The shop owner cleaned the tanks and refilled them and we picked them up next trip. Never breathe air with a taste!

We were lucky because it had a taste, so we aborted the dive. No taste and the CO has an open hand.
 
Was the taste linked to CO? Carbon Monoxide is odorless.
I'm not clear on what Bob meant by that statement, but CO does not have a taste. A tank with CO may well have other impurities from a compressor problem like they found in his case, so they were lucky that it did.
No taste and the CO has an open hand
 
Instead of dumping straight from the tank into the bag, I have an air-gun which attaches to a BCD hose in my save-a-dive-kit. That requires attaching some regulators of course, but maybe more reliable and less annoying than trying to control a bag and a tank-valve.

I have two CO detectors/alarms in my home; the wall-mounted ones are pretty cheap, around $30. I had just assumed those wouldn't really work for scuba.

As far as the once-per-day checks, I decided to do 2-minutes of research and discovered you can get an inline model for about $500. Now, $500 might be a lot for an individual scuba-diver, but for fill-station that is CHEAP! Much better than demanding your potentially unreliable employees to check the CO 1-2x per day, which they'll probably skip. I retract my once-per-day idea as pretty silly.


At Murex, the diver and the guide checked every tank together and then slapped divers name on tank before being loaded onto boat.
One hoped that the calibration was right. I checked it against air tank first. Seemed OK.

One trip in Padang Bai, where we checked tanks on board, problem arose. Not that there was trouble in the tank, only between guides ears. Things went much more smoothly once he learned how to use the detector properly.
 

Back
Top Bottom