conservative settings?

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simbrooks

Snr LayZboy Meteorologist
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I have been trying to look around for computers and see what is the deal with some of the "cheaper" ones that have user defined conservatism settings, like Oceanic and Aeris have (i am sure others do as well). If you use these conservatism settings, would you have a computer that is as conservative as say a Suunto? The people at my LDS's have shown me various computers that you can set the conservatism to either the red end or well into the green end of the spectrum, that is somewhere allowing you to get near "deco" or staying well away from it. As i havent taken any of these out i would not be sure how much of a difference these extremes of the spectrum would make to my bottom time etc with all other things being equal. I know a LOT of people on here use Suunto, but i was wondering if they had dove with others using these 'lesser' computers and seen difference on a variety of settings.

Thanks again, Simon
 
To my knowledge the Aeris/Oceanic/Sherwood/Genesis computers do not have a conservatism setting, but only an alarm that you can set to go off when the nitrogen bar graph reaches a certain level. While this is not a bad feature, it does not help you very much as this setting does not affect the other readings.

E.g. the alarm might go off because you have reached the first "yellow" bar, but the no-deco time may still show 10 minutes.

So it is up to you what to follow: the bar graph or the digits. And for deco diving the bar graph is of course useless.
 
I guess that is how they portrayed it in the shop that you set the conservativeness, they didnt mention how it affected the dive time or an alarm, just that you could set it safer or not so safe. I guess this pretty much answers my question.
 
The best conservatism move you can make is to ascend on EVERY dive like you are on a deco curve.

For example, for a dive to 100', you might make a stop at 70', 60' and 50' for one minute, then 40 and 30 for 2, then 20 and 10 (or 15) for 3 each, and make your final ascent at a rate of one foot for every 10 seconds (that is, 6 fpm!)

Yes, it will take longer to surface doing this. But you will have a MUCH lower gas tension in your tissues when you do surface, you will essentially eliminate the risk of an AGE, and your risk of DCI will go WAY down.
 
That is good advice, i was more after the amount of bottom time you got from the computers though. With my equalization troubles and moderate breathing rate, i would pretty much only touch the bottom (maybe 10-12 mins, roughly 0.7scfm on an AL80 ending at 500psi and taking 3 mins to descend to 100') before making it back up using that profile :wink: I understand where you are coming from and truly that would give me a shorter bottom time no matter what the computers are telling me.

Just as a point of order/question to check how much time/conservativeness (and what computer do you use) if you ran the simulation mode on your computer for the following profile:
dive 1 to 100ft, w/stops at 60, 50, 40 for 1 min, 30 for 3 mins, 20 for 3 mins, all with ascent at 20ft/min.
SI 1 hour
dive 2 to 70ft w/stops as before
SI 2 hours
dive 3 to 60ft w/stops at 40, 30 and 20 as before

What are your bottom times for these dives using those profiles, which i dont think are unreasonable, and what is the computer you are simulating it on? If i can get results from the Suunto computations and others too to compare that would help. I chose 20ft safety stop as 15ft is harder to keep in the swell that comes off the SE FL coast, it would all be drift diving as well, so dont have to run the air calcs as much with turn pressure etc. Make sense?
 
Genesis:
The best conservatism move you can make is to ascend on EVERY dive like you are on a deco curve.

For example, for a dive to 100', you might make a stop at 70', 60' and 50' for one minute, then 40 and 30 for 2, then 20 and 10 (or 15) for 3 each, and make your final ascent at a rate of one foot for every 10 seconds (that is, 6 fpm!)

Yes, it will take longer to surface doing this. But you will have a MUCH lower gas tension in your tissues when you do surface, you will essentially eliminate the risk of an AGE, and your risk of DCI will go WAY down.

Good advice, regarding the 50' stop, but I am not sure if you are doing any good at 70' or 60', in your example.

I would say, in this example, 100' for no more than 15 mins (summing to 115), then 50 ft for 1 min, 25 ft for another min, and then 15 ft for a full 3 mins.

Even better yet, on a dive to 100 ft, use EANx, then you can sum to 120, spending 20 mins there, followed by the 50, 25, and 15 ft stops, and with the EANx the offgassing would be even more efficient.
 
You're probably not, but the 70' stop is one you'd have to make if you were doing real deco (for a gas switch) in most cases.

It won't hurt you substantially in terms of gas loading on any dive to 100' or deeper; its not a long time in this case, just one minute, and it gets you "in sync" with the ascent rate and stop timing from there on up.

I prefer not to come up more than one atmosphere before I make my first stop, even on recreational dives. I'll do it if there's some reason to (e.g. the person you're diving with, or you, has a problem such as being underweighted that makes it difficult to hold stops accurately) but in general I prefer to make the stops even if they're not "technically" necessary.
 
https://www.shearwater.com/products/perdix-ai/

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