Probably, I never tried for any period of time. DUI (Diving Unlimited then) built an open top steel tank to develop the suit and later to demonstrate it to the Navy and other potential customers. They literally filled it with water and added tons of ice delivered by truck. I imagine they made a few adjustments to the tubing arrangement and hole spacing until they found the sweet spot. Fortunately, it was pretty well dialed-in by the time I came along.
Their first suits were regular ¼" Rubatex Nylon-2 used in their custom wetsuits. The tubes ran on the outside and were covered by 1/8" Neoprene. There was a bypass valve plus separate flow valves for the upper and lower body (or maybe front and back); everybody just left them open. They introduced the current suit with the tubing running inside and only the bypass valve around 1973. They started crushing them about a year later, which had several advantages. If you didn’t decompress the uncrushed suits with the divers they would expand about 3x and destroy the material. Cruising also made them much more flexible and take-up less limited space in the chambers.
The first patent on open-circuit hot water heated wetsuits was granted to George C. Wiswell, but for all practical purposes Dick Long (DUI/Diving Unlimited International) made the market and held related patents. Here are some links with images.
Hot Water Suits for commercial diving by DUI - Diving Unlimited International
Hot Water Suit
The suit used on this show were made by a competitor (Patents expired years ago). They are intended to be very loose fitting. Most companies have you wear coveralls to prolong their life. DUI’s Nylon on the outside is about 4x thinker than the inside Nylon for added toughness. Most divers use some form of rash guard or chaffing protection — you can image how floating around inside a cloud of hot water for up to 8 hours can make your skin pretty delicate.
Quarter inch ID rubber tubes extend from the manifold along the front and back of the torso, down each limb, and have open tubes for feet, hands, and head. The tube at the head is usually blocked off when wearing a hat but vital on a FFM. Holes are punched in the tubing about every 4". The water is tapped before going into the suit for heating breathing gas, typically below 500-600' or in especially cold water.
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More like any kind of surface-supplied diving. Oh well, at least they had comms, even if they didn’t always hang around to monitor it!
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Very wise decision. You do realize that salt water isn’t the only warm fluid that exits the suit on an 8 hour dive right?
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