Flex hoses - looking for recommendations from users

[glashoppah]

So stick with rubber, nothing you've said yet is a reason to change

You must have missed the post about me being really tired of fighting the torque from the rubber hose on my reg. Drives me nuts.

H.

 

[Tortuga68]

You must have missed the post about me being really tired of fighting the torque from the rubber hose on my reg

Yes, I did miss it. What length of hose are you currently using?

Miflex are nice for =<5' length, longer than that I don't like them

Alternatively you could consider going to a rubber long hose setup =>5'

Lastly some people like right angle or swivel fittings although personally I don't

 

[buddhasummer]

I like a 40" primary with 90degree elbow, for this Miflex works ok.

---------- Post added June 3rd, 2013 at 05:35 AM ----------

You must have missed the post about me being really tired of fighting the torque from the rubber hose on my reg. Drives me nuts.

H.

If its pulling or pushing its likely too short or too long respectively.

 

[beanojones]

So stick with rubber, nothing you've said yet is a reason to change

Nthing this comment. There are reasons to go with the braided hoses (weight, flexibility for storage, etc), and there are reasons to avoid them (memory effect of the bends, floating, rough feel on skin, horrendous record of sudden separation failure of the HP hoses that was supposedly solved, but still happens with alarming frequency well after the problem was solved)

If reliability is the goal stick with rubber, at least with HP. Rubber HP hoses fail gradually (usually). Failure by complete separation at the crimp is the only way I have seen braided HP hoses fail, and I have seen it happen. It's annoying because when the hose and the gauge goes flying off, most divers (myself included) don;t want to lose the gauge so the diver ends up doing something other than immediately ending the dive while they search for the separated hose with the gauge attached to it.

You must have missed the post about me being really tired of fighting the torque from the rubber hose on my reg. Drives me nuts.

Choosing to use a double braided hose to get rid of torque is can be trading one kind of discomfort with another, because of the memory effect of the braided hose, which does not exist in rubber hose.

As noted above, routing under the arm with a swivel (90, or 120 degrees), or the loop around the neck with a swivel (45 or 120 degrees), is the way to get rid of annoying torque. I cannot stand any hose routed over the right shoulder to my mouth because they all make the reg want to pull out of my mouth regardless of what kind of hose is being used. I hate the way reg pull out of the mouth with standard hose routing, a fact I was reminded of recently when, hilariously enough, a complete separation failure of my double braided HP hose forced me to borrow and use a standard rental setup with the over the shoulder hose routing.

I personally use a 5 footer MiFlex. I am willing to put up with the floatiness, and the fact it takes 40-50 dives to train it to stop having funny memory effects* because it is much lighter, and when trapping the hose against a tank in sidemount configuration, it's easier to tuck into position under the hose bungies on the tank. But double braided hose frays and rubs, and it starts to unravel the braiding at the first stage when used without a hose protector.

*As far as I can tell, it never loses its memory effect, it's just that being word in the same position for long enough forces the braid to align into that routing. If the hose gets put on another first stage, its back to fighting that weird torquiness for 50-60 dives until the braided aligns itself in to the new pattern.