Triton rebreather or Hollis Prism2. Getting into CCR diving with a recreational diver background.

[Superlyte27]

Oh, FYI, if a competent diver, CCR is always cheaper than Nitrox diving based on 300 hours per year at retail consumables and maintenance. A ccr at full retail based on 300 hours per year is about $10/hr at any depth. What’s a single tank of Nitrox cost?

 

[davehicks]

Apologies for saying this, but this thinking is wrong in so many ways.

1. Rebreathers are technical diving. You may be diving within NDLs, but you are mixing gasses, having to deal with bailout, must use a lot of new skills, have very different planning and preparation needs...
2. You want to dive at the limits of NDLs, for example at 40m/132ft. A rebreather will give you the additional gas time, but you still have to carry sufficient bailout with you -- aka PONY. For this you need to do A LOT OF TRAINING, PRACTICE, PREPARATION AND DIVING otherwise IT WILL KILL YOU.
3. Rebreathers are very expensive. $10k for starters. Need at least one challenging course then YOU MUST dive with other rebreather divers for practice. Lots of practice.
4. Rebreathers need a lot of maintenance and preparation for every dive. OC: check gas, jump in. A rebreather requires hours of preparation which you MUST be pedantic and follow checklists. If you don't do this, it will happily kill you.
5. Rebreathers need high pressure oxygen which isn't commonly available from recreational dive shops.
6. Rebreathers, by their very nature, will encourage you to break the NDLs as there's basically no gas limits. A 40m/132ft dive is 8 minutes using the PADI (air) RDP. Most rebreather divers on here would dive that for an hour or more, with a full runtime of a couple of hours or more. This means that recreational dive boats will give you a hard time when you demand way more dive time than the 40 minutes of all the single tank NDL divers.
7. Rebreathers don't mix with open circuit divers. Sure, you can, but you're on your own as an OC diver hasn't a clue about your unit.
8. You NEVER buy a rebreather based upon the stock levels of a local dive shop. There's so much more to rebreathers than that.
9. Photography. You'll have to stop doing that for a long time whilst you practice your new skills on the rebreather. You CANNOT be distracted from running the rebreather otherwise you will get into trouble. You'll probably need a whole season to learn and practice on the rebreather before you go back to photography.
10. Rebreathers for this dive profile -- NDLs -- will be more expensive to run per dive than an open circuit equivalent. HP oxygen top-up; scrubber replacement; cells; cleaning; other maintenance.

Just dive on a twinset/doubles. Small cost (backplate + wing + twinset + 2 regs) costing under $1k if you buy wisely. This gives you loads of gas, there's very few new skills to learn (literally planning and shutdowns). You could even learn sidemount which would give you all the additional gas and redundancy you want.

Sorry to say this, but a rebreather really isn't for you for the reasons given in your original post.

That's a lot of questionable opinion written in the style of confident fact. I would dispute about half your points and your final conclusion most of all.

 

[WOB0.01J]

Apologies for saying this, but this thinking is wrong in so many ways.

1. Rebreathers are technical diving. You may be diving within NDLs, but you are mixing gasses, having to deal with bailout, must use a lot of new skills, have very different planning and preparation needs...
2. You want to dive at the limits of NDLs, for example at 40m/132ft. A rebreather will give you the additional gas time, but you still have to carry sufficient bailout with you -- aka PONY. For this you need to do A LOT OF TRAINING, PRACTICE, PREPARATION AND DIVING otherwise IT WILL KILL YOU.
3. Rebreathers are very expensive. $10k for starters. Need at least one challenging course then YOU MUST dive with other rebreather divers for practice. Lots of practice.
4. Rebreathers need a lot of maintenance and preparation for every dive. OC: check gas, jump in. A rebreather requires hours of preparation which you MUST be pedantic and follow checklists. If you don't do this, it will happily kill you.
5. Rebreathers need high pressure oxygen which isn't commonly available from recreational dive shops.
6. Rebreathers, by their very nature, will encourage you to break the NDLs as there's basically no gas limits. A 40m/132ft dive is 8 minutes using the PADI (air) RDP. Most rebreather divers on here would dive that for an hour or more, with a full runtime of a couple of hours or more. This means that recreational dive boats will give you a hard time when you demand way more dive time than the 40 minutes of all the single tank NDL divers.
7. Rebreathers don't mix with open circuit divers. Sure, you can, but you're on your own as an OC diver hasn't a clue about your unit.
8. You NEVER buy a rebreather based upon the stock levels of a local dive shop. There's so much more to rebreathers than that.
9. Photography. You'll have to stop doing that for a long time whilst you practice your new skills on the rebreather. You CANNOT be distracted from running the rebreather otherwise you will get into trouble. You'll probably need a whole season to learn and practice on the rebreather before you go back to photography.
10. Rebreathers for this dive profile -- NDLs -- will be more expensive to run per dive than an open circuit equivalent. HP oxygen top-up; scrubber replacement; cells; cleaning; other maintenance.

Just dive on a twinset/doubles. Small cost (backplate + wing + twinset + 2 regs) costing under $1k if you buy wisely. This gives you loads of gas, there's very few new skills to learn (literally planning and shutdowns). You could even learn sidemount which would give you all the additional gas and redundancy you want.

Sorry to say this, but a rebreather really isn't for you for the reasons given in your original post.

Thank you for your inquiries and detailed response! I am well aware of the maintenance and checklists that are absolutely required for a CCR dive. One of my major concerns is actually the charter boat situation. I need to find similar CCR divers who will be doing similar NDL profile, OC divers just won’t cut it

 

[davehicks]

Thank you for your inquiries and detailed response! I am well aware of the maintenance and checklists that are absolutely required for a CCR dive. One of my major concerns is actually the charter boat situation. I need to find similar CCR divers who will be doing similar NDL profile, OC divers just won’t cut it

I dive with OC divers all the time. Just because you are on CCR does not mean you have to go to 200ft for three hours. While i sometimes take advantage of the CCR for extended dive time, deep square profiles, or reduced deco time, I also do many recreational dives enjoying the silence and freedom of a rebreather. The only thing a charter cares about is if you stick to their max dive time of 60mins or whatever.

 

[GF99/99]

Hi divers

My local dive shop has two rebreather available which are prism 2 and triton from M3S. My primary reason to get into CCR is because I want to increase my bottom time at the recreational depth limit without have to keep coming to the surface and change tanks. I also like the bubble free diving and helps with my photography due to the lack of bubbles.

I am not trying to get into technical diving, but just purely want to enjoy the CCR’s benefit at a recreational level.

What are your thoughts??

First off I see it says your located in NH, maybe I have been out of the Tirton game for a while but I was unaware of an instructor and parts support in the US. See my post below about the Triton and how they possibly have the worst customer service ever.

For casual diving and first time unit I would suggest backmount all day long. The Triton is a very very specific unit and honestly "sidemount" rebreather setup is a little bit fidgety if your doing it for photography purposes (and Im sure someone will suggest the Choptima to you as well but that this is significantly larger than the Triton making it even more of a PIA for photography especially if your a small frame person)

Also see my post a while ago about the Triton, not saying its a bad unit as I do own one and actually really like it for what I use it for but I bought it for a very specific use.
Post #22
Question - CCR Suggestion for Remote Boating Trips - Sanity Check
and some here as well
Question - CCR Suggestion for Remote Boating Trips - Sanity Check

 

[GiraffeMarineSalvage]

I was glad to get my Triton Air Dil certification from Jeffrey Downing (@AmbassadorsoftheSea) in New Hampshire, but I believe he is one of only two Triton instructors currently in the USA (the other in Florida).
I'm very happy with the Triton minus monox, but I can't speak to all the other options Marsh9077 knows well.
But I will add one element of my thinking in choosing the Triton was if I were to ever progress beyond it's capabilities I would have an excellent backup rebreather which I would inherently be most familiar with under a bailout situation...

 

[WOB0.01J]

I was glad to get my Triton Air Dil certification from Jeffrey Downing (@AmbassadorsoftheSea) in New Hampshire, but I believe he is one of only two Triton instructors currently in the USA (the other in Florida).
I'm very happy with the Triton minus monox, but I can't speak to all the other options Marsh9077 knows well.
But I will add one element of my thinking in choosing the Triton was if I were to ever progress beyond it's capabilities I would have an excellent backup rebreather which I would inherently be most familiar with under a bailout situation...

Agreed! I contacted Jeff last week and scheduled a try CCR dive with him, seems like a very nice guy. I am looking forward to it

 

[Wibble]

That's a lot of questionable opinion written in the style of confident fact. I would dispute about half your points and your final conclusion most of all.

That’s good as a discussion will tend to include other’s opinions.

What do you disagree with?

Have written that post in a style that doesn’t glorify nor simply diving on a rebreather. The fact is that moving to a rebreather is a large commitment of money, time and effort. Learning to dive a rebreather is hard. You will not be diving with your Open Circuit friends for some time whilst you learn to dive on your new rebreather. Rebreathers quickly lead you beyond the NDLs and you need to have the experience to handle that.

I suppose I could have written the "demo version": yay, rebreathers are great and just what you want as your next step as an open water recreational diver.

 

[boriss]

A rebreather absolutely changes NDL. Ask my dove buddy’s why I’m getting out 30-50 minutes faster than them when they are on OC. I’m using perfect mix every second. They are using perfect mix for just a few minutes of the entire dive.

This doesn't apply to the OP, he's doing open water NDL dives. When it comes to ocean dives it's a relatively square profile. Even with decompression, we have about the same bottom time and runtimes for OC and CCR doing local dives.

 

[Wibble]

Oh, FYI, if a competent diver, CCR is always cheaper than Nitrox diving based on 300 hours per year at retail consumables and maintenance. A ccr at full retail based on 300 hours per year is about $10/hr at any depth. What’s a single tank of Nitrox cost?

300 hours!

A busy diving year would be 100 hours especially for NDL diving with an average dive time well under an hour. A typical hobby diver would likely be well under 100 hours, maybe 50 hours = 70 dives