Benthic
Contributor
Oh dear God......PerroneFord:While not strictly a rebreather question, I have a question for those of you who routinely push your canister lights beyond 4 hours.
What are you using? I suppose the 13.5A/10w HID would give enough time, and it might be close with an 18w at the same amperage. I had a conversation over the weekend with a light builder about the possibility of a custom light canister for driving the 21w HID I am looking to buy. It seemed doable, and then it struck me that this might be something RB divers would be interested in.
So how about it? Would you go back to carrying the larger SLA sized canisters to have 8+ hours burntime on your 21w HIDs? I'm not talking a return to the days of the AUL Spectrum lights, but something larger than the common 9A and 13A canisters we see commonly now.
Thanks for your thoughts.
I'm probably going to regret posting this, but here goes.
Perrone, this is insane! Don't you think you have the cart in front of the horse here?!?! According to your profile, you're not certified and have done no dives. Now, I know that's not true and that you are certified. However the last I knew, you were chasing my wife for an AOW card (a class you subsequently cancelled), and you didn't have either a cave card of a trimix card. So when, exactly, are you planning on making dives that would require a light that will burn longer than 4-6 hours? Your money and energy would be FAR better spent on experience and training at this point. Why don't you worry about that for now? There are plenty of high powered (i.e. HID) lights on the market that will burn 6-8 hours and that will meet your needs WELL into your cave diving career. If you've got plans to do deep RB cave diving, then good for you. However there are about 1000 things that you'll need to accomplish between now and then. You are worrying about task number 892 when you should be worrying about task number 1 (training) and task number 2 (experience). In the meantime there are several of us who would greatly appreciate it if you would stop pontificating about rebreathers and scrubber duration times when you clearly know nothing about them. Here's a few facts for you. ISC's Meg scrubber is 'officially' rated at 4 hours (go ahead, call and ask them). The Cis-Lunar scrubber for the Meg is not in production. The radial that is in production by Golem Gear has not formally been tested in a lab.
Now then, to answer your question about lights. There are plenty of ways to get a light to burn for longer than 4 hours. More than a few are available as off the shelf products from Salvo, Halcyon, Sartek, etc. Also I'd be willing to bet that any of those companies would be happy to talk to you about designing and building a specialty application light if you were serious about it (how do you think I got a Halcyon wing on my Megalodon?). There are people out there doing dives that last well into the 8-12 hour range and they have already addressed the problem of lighting for those durations. I don't know what all the solutions are, but if you really want answers to that question you should ask them. Here's a hint--most of them don't read ScubaBoard.
So please, stop acting like you've got this pressing high-tech problem that needs a solution. You are talking about problems that are faced by those on the cutting edge and you are clearly a very long ways from that edge.
Brian