Oceanic Geo Battery

[RAWalker]

Hi DarkCoffee,
I was the person that discovered a link to oxidation of the battery terminals and sync problems and recommended cleaning with a pencil eraser and alcohol. My recommendation was for the transmitter and it's battery. It seems that you may have taken the suggestion and applied it to the DC and it's coin style battery with some positive results. The bottom line is that both the DC and it's transmitter seem to be fairly sensitive to voltage drop. Any contamination on the contacts can lead to early low battery indications. The quality of the battery may or may not increase the occurance of the problem but with the relatively low current of these batteries any contamination such as the oils remaining from the manufacturing process or from your fingers may cause some resistance to electrical flow.
I would however be very cautious using this technique on the terminals inside the DC their design does not allow for much mechanical force from the eraser and the alcohol should only be allowed to contact the metal terminals.

 

[azchipka]

I have noticed that with the Geo and Atom2 the batteries that come from Oceanic tend to last me about two months where the ones from radio shack or other locations about a month.

Personally I think it has nothing to do with how makes the battery but how much of a charge they have in them when you open them. Since I can get them online for $0.75 from a 3rd party instead of $20.00 from oceanic I just replace mine on the 1st of the month every month and haven't had any issues since.

 

[D_B]

From a post by factory rep Doug Krause, Oceanic recomends ONLY Panasonic or Sony batteries for their other dive computers ... it's due to the fact they are the only ones that are rated for "Pulsed Duty" .. the momentary high current draw needed at times by the computer ... see here ... http://www.scubaboard.com/forums/3691845-post2.html

.. maybe something to think about here too

 

[Weldon Wade]

I own a Geo. Been using it for a few months and it just started acting strange, shutting off without showing the batt low message. then yesterday, got the message. What you are telling me is that I have to replace the battery MONTHLY? That doesn't seem right.

Weldon

 

[jhayes75]

I returned mine to Manf and they upgraded the firmware. If you have the cable and have a later version of 1A, you will be able to do it yourself. This is believed to fix the problem. So far my battery is still OK.

 

[Revid1]

I returned mine to Manf and they upgraded the firmware. If you have the cable and have a later version of 1A, you will be able to do it yourself. This is believed to fix the problem. So far my battery is still OK.

Ive had a Geo 2.0 and Veo 1.0 for 4 years. Only have replaced battery at local shop every 2 years as recommended and no trouble. Hopefully, a new battery will last as long.

 

[mikeycanuk]

Anyone have the part # for the Geo o ring? I assume the BUD is the same comp.?


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk HD

 

[spoolin01]

Ive had a Geo 2.0 and Veo 1.0 for 4 years. Only have replaced battery at local shop every 2 years as recommended and no trouble. Hopefully, a new battery will last as long.

This was an issue with early generations of the small Oceanic and Aeris wrist computers. It affected all of the small wrist models (Geo, Manta, F10 - were there others?), but I haven't heard if it was a problem with the larger models like the Veo. I'm pretty sure it was not an issue with the Geo 2.0. At this point, I'd expect that anyone who had a problem device knows about it, since it's got to be at least two battery lifetimes since the problem was apparently fixed at the production level. Battery issues are seen reported with other models like the Veo, but I don't know the extent of those or if they share the same cause.


It was a design issue with the battery compartment, which had a hardware solution (per Aeris' service dept). To my knowledge - which may be lacking - Oceanic never got out in front of this such as with a recall or even a disclosure that would identify the affected models/production runs and encourage owners to have them fixed rather than waste time and money replacing batteries every few days or chasing voodoo fixes like shorting terminals, pencil erasers, or finding 'really good' batteries, and it was up to the rumor mill to spread the word about availability of the hardware fix. This thread is a great example - it went on for a year with nary a peep from the host rep despite the cause being known to them at the time. Nor will you find disclosure in any of the handful of other threads here on this topic, that I have seen. I first found out about it on a freedive forum from a lively discussion amongst owners of the recently released F10 freedive watch.

I had the issue occur shortly after warranty expiration, with my 2nd gen Manta, and had to pay an additional $150 for the fix. Since then I've replaced batteries at normal intervals, without problem. The experience left me with poor regard for Oceanic.