Ok our youngest daughter is completeing her Instructors course while attending a Tourism Management program specializing in Scuba at Capilano University in Sechelt BC. We bought her a top notch white dry suit at the beginning of the course. She is diving everyday multiple times and its a great course. Now after 100-200 dives she is telling us her Drysuit is wearing out. Now my reaction is...you arent taking care of it for 2500 bucks it better last more than 100 dives. My only experience with a dry suit is one day which taught me that warm water and a 3 mil is way better. I would love if you folks could provide some fact checking for me. Thanks
If she takes care of it, her drysuit will last for years. Our rental inventory has some that have seen huge amounts of use and abuse for decades and are still alive and well.
That said, some parts of the drysuit are "wear items". The neck and wrist seals degrade over time (the latex becomes sticky/crunchy/cracked/etc.) and will eventually stretch enough that it leaks or will rip. These need to be replaced on an as-needed basis, although "as needed" depends
a lot on how the suit was maintained and stored.
The zipper will eventually wear out and need to be replaced, but again, it's life is determined by maintenance. If the zipper is kept clean and lubricated according to the manufacturer's instructions, it will last quite a long time.
The rest of the suit is a (tri-lam?) fabric and is easily patched if it develops leaks.
In short, unless she set it on fire, there's pretty much nothing that will happen to the suit that can't be fixed by replacing the zipper, wrist and neck seals and maybe patching a few leaks.
PS. If the suit needs the wrist seals replaced, have the serivce company install "rings" (they'll know what this is). The rings allow replacing the seals with nothing more than popping an inner ring out, and installing a new seal, as well as allowing the use of dry-gloves.
Terry
