Hello, all-
My wife & I are getting sick of shelling out $12-$16/day of diving for renting tanks at the local quarries, and we're thinking of adding cylinders to our equipment config.
I've done a fair amount of reading about the various cylinders out there, but have a few questions.
First, we both dive a SS BP/W, 3mil wet suits, freshwater, with no weight on our belts (when using AL80's). We're both neutral at 500psig at the surface w/ AL80s. Our air consumption is about identical, and we're pretty much sippers...not guzzlers. Diving is generally fairly shallow in the inland quarries/lakes - 30ft-50ft averages. We're diving single tanks only.
Now, after much reading on here, I'm learning more about steel cylinders and their increased longevity, perhaps reduced maintenance, smaller size (in some cases), etc. HOWEVER, it seems that with our current weighting (no weight w/ AL80), we'd be quite overweighted when throwing a steel tank in place of the AL80. E.g., replacing an AL80 that's -3# at the start of a dive with a PST E7-100 (-8.5# full), we'd be pushing 12# neg at the beginning (6# bp/w + full cylinder).
So, it seems that our options are:
1. Buy AL80s. We're weighted well for them, plenty o' air, we're comfortable with their heights (we're both about 5'8), etc.
2. Ditch the SS bp/w, buy an aluminum BP to shed weight, and get steel tanks of some variety.
What would you recommend?
Jim
(To complicate matters a bit, however, we ARE interested in picking up dry suit diving in the next year or so, which will obviously change our weighting substantially...perhaps we need to take a dry suit class, figure out our weighting requirements, and see if we can come up with a config that will handle both scenarios...thinking out loud here....)
My wife & I are getting sick of shelling out $12-$16/day of diving for renting tanks at the local quarries, and we're thinking of adding cylinders to our equipment config.
I've done a fair amount of reading about the various cylinders out there, but have a few questions.
First, we both dive a SS BP/W, 3mil wet suits, freshwater, with no weight on our belts (when using AL80's). We're both neutral at 500psig at the surface w/ AL80s. Our air consumption is about identical, and we're pretty much sippers...not guzzlers. Diving is generally fairly shallow in the inland quarries/lakes - 30ft-50ft averages. We're diving single tanks only.
Now, after much reading on here, I'm learning more about steel cylinders and their increased longevity, perhaps reduced maintenance, smaller size (in some cases), etc. HOWEVER, it seems that with our current weighting (no weight w/ AL80), we'd be quite overweighted when throwing a steel tank in place of the AL80. E.g., replacing an AL80 that's -3# at the start of a dive with a PST E7-100 (-8.5# full), we'd be pushing 12# neg at the beginning (6# bp/w + full cylinder).
So, it seems that our options are:
1. Buy AL80s. We're weighted well for them, plenty o' air, we're comfortable with their heights (we're both about 5'8), etc.
2. Ditch the SS bp/w, buy an aluminum BP to shed weight, and get steel tanks of some variety.
What would you recommend?
Jim
(To complicate matters a bit, however, we ARE interested in picking up dry suit diving in the next year or so, which will obviously change our weighting substantially...perhaps we need to take a dry suit class, figure out our weighting requirements, and see if we can come up with a config that will handle both scenarios...thinking out loud here....)
