SFLDiver3445
Contributor
At this point more people are being turned off by the high fatality rate of eCCR's (1%) than turned on by impressive electronics. The number of manual rebreathers being offered suggests a lot of salmon are figuring out that they don't need to swim up stream.
The injection of oxygen just may turn out to be the one thing that humans do better than machines.
Gill, one important point that not everyone may be aware of is the fact that with an eccr, such as my Optima, you do have the option of running the unit electronically or manually. So even if folks do have that concern, you can lock in your your setpoint lower (say 1.0) and manually maintain the setpoint higher (say 1.2), that way you have the best of both worlds - You maintain it manually, but if need be, the electronics will maintain the setpoint at a minimum of 1.0. Wasn't there a thread posted on RW the other day when a diver had an emergency and needed to assist another diver in distress on the surface, only to realize after, that he had over breathed his loop, but was too distracted to monitor and add gas - In that scenario, the backup electronics option would have addressed that scenario and avoided that divers near hypoxic event.
So even looking at the debate from your perspective, there are advantages to an eccr, even if you run it manually 100% of the time.