Diving Dry? Balance your Rig!

[Jim Lapenta]

There's a more important reason not to use helium in the drysuit. Look up isobaric counterdiffusion. You do not want to be absorbing helium through your skin at the same time as you are trying to off gas it. And you don't need argon to use a suit bottle. I have a six cu ft that has seen nothing but air as a suit bottle. Argon is expensive and frankly I can't tell the difference between it and air. Maybe because I refused to use half a bottle just to flush the suit and undergarments of air so I would only have argon or mostly argon in it. That seems to me to be the only way to get the max benefit from it.

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[Diver0001]

Seems to me that isobaric counter-diffusion is one of those things that has more relevance to avoiding inner ear DCS in saturation divers than it has with anything remotely relevant to recreational divers. Moreover, avoiding ICD would seem easier if the suit were full of trimix as opposed to something like air, which is what a lot of people put in their argon bottles.

Admittedly it might be the reason that some divers choose argon and I know that divers like Mark Ellyatt need to account for it in their dive planning (at least that's what he told me) but what guys like that are doing is pretty much off the map of the known universe for most divers.

We seem to getting a long way off topic though. The idea of using a separate "argon" type inflation system for the drysuit in order to be able to inflate the suit independently from the back gas was the point of this.... I guess it may help in some situations but for the complication in the other 99.9% of dives you do, I wonder if it's a valid risk mitigation measure.

What do you guys think?

R..

 

[Jim Lapenta]

A 6 cu ft bottle on the plate under the arm is not a complication. Unless you forget to hook it up. I don't even notice it's there.

 

[dive_turkey]

The other part of a balanced rig is on the surface. Your wing needs to be able to float everything. You need to take everything negative and positive and folate it on your wing. I remember a method from Steve's book using a fishing scale. I haven't done this exercise yet because I just got some new gear but I need to do it this winter.

I'm assuming, because I have not read the book yet, that the method is to put all your gear in the water and then use the scale to measure how much it pulls in either direction? So, a positively buoyant article will be measured with the scale up-side-down as the object pulls towards the surface? I was thinking about trying something like this while we're at the pool this weekend. Measuring each piece of gear separately while at the bottom of the pool to determine net buoyancy and weighting.

unless I'm way off base...

 

[dytis-sm]

How useful can a large lift bag be, in a BCD failure situation where the rig is not balanced?
My guess is that one can roll it out like the safety sausage, clip it on the BCD harness and float to the surface. Not an elegant solution but something one can do as long as they have air.

 

[Dive Right In Scuba]

How useful can a large lift bag be, in a BCD failure situation where the rig is not balanced?
My guess is that one can roll it out like the safety sausage, clip it on the BCD harness and float to the surface. Not an elegant solution but something one can do as long as they have air.

If you need buoyancy, ANYTHING, regardless of how it looks.....is a lifesaver.

 

[dive_turkey]

If you need buoyancy, ANYTHING, regardless of how it looks.....is a lifesaver.

...or ditchable!

 

[tracydr]

There's a more important reason not to use helium in the drysuit. Look up isobaric counterdiffusion. You do not want to be absorbing helium through your skin at the same time as you are trying to off gas it. And you don't need argon to use a suit bottle. I have a six cu ft that has seen nothing but air as a suit bottle. Argon is expensive and frankly I can't tell the difference between it and air. Maybe because I refused to use half a bottle just to flush the suit and undergarments of air so I would only have argon or mostly argon in it. That seems to me to be the only way to get the max benefit from it.

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i think you have to flush 6 times to be able to see any difference at all. Seems like a lot of argon. That's just from the DAN presentation I watched on exposure protection. I really have no argon experience,whatsoever,

 

[mala]

i think you have to flush 6 times to be able to see any difference at all. Seems like a lot of argon. That's just from the DAN presentation I watched on exposure protection. I really have no argon experience,whatsoever,

I think the benefits or argon are in the mind.
works out at about 1 degree celcius per $10

 

[Agility]

My guess is that one can roll it out like the safety sausage, clip it on the BCD harness and float to the surface.

I would not clip it to my harness, I would deploy it like a DSMB using a spool (or a reel) to stay in control of my ascent speed