I've been doing tons of diving related reading and have got a question about PDC failure. I know and practice the "one is none, two is one" philosophy in other aspects of life and believe in redundancy and will be doing that more in diving as I delve into it more. I hear everyone saying/asking, what if your PDC failed? So my question is how many of you have had a dive comp failure while diving? I don't consider a dead battery or flooding due to an improperly reinstalled o-ring a failure for my purposes, just a genuine, non user induced equipment failure. Especially of tech computers.
ETA
If you have had a failure and don't mind, please elaborate.
If you haven't had one would you like DM Tom did say how long you've been using your comp and maybe the model, if you don't mind?
I've had or seen first hand multiple "failures" over the years. One of those involved a computer that was physically broken. There was a bit of loose solder inside the housing that caused it to crap out in the middle of a dive. The computer was new and it was replaced under warranty but ended the dive.
I've seen quite a few give faulty depth readings. This is a common and potentially dangerous failure mode that has to do with the pressure transducers either being blocked or not working as intended and giving faulty depth readings. Several that I have seen have caused the computer to remain in dive mode after a dive and one I can recall caused a faulty depth reading that was about
5 metres shallower than the actual depth. For this reason I have adopted the habit of occasionally checking my computer against my buddy's computer and/or wearing a bottom timer (because I happen to have one) as a 2nd reference when I'm not sure how deep the site is.
Finally, I've had seen .... I want to say about a dozen .... computers just stop for no apparent reason and turn themselves off under water. Years ago it was more common than it is now, but most recently I saw it on a computer that my OW student last weekend was using (a fairly modern Cressi). Usually this happens in colder water and every time I have seen it, including last weekend, the problem was a nearly dead battery that was further affected by the cold water. This kind of failure is "user" failure from not being alert to the low battery warning but usually presents only after you're in the water, which is a pain in the butt.
Let me see... oh yeah. One of my regular buddies has had .... I believe the count is now 4 or 5 VR3's. They look really cool and for the price of them you'd be forgiven for thinking they must be well made but they've had multiple software and hardware problems. He still dives with the last one they sent him but he's told me that when (in his mind, not if, but when) this one dies he'll replace it with another brand. He hasn't done that yet because it's still under warranty. Other people that I know who have had VR3s over the years have all replaced them already and for the same reason: they couldn't trust their lives to it. He's the only one I know who is still diving with one although he bought a Helo2 as a backup so he has at least one "reliable" computer. The point here being that not all computers are created equally and some are more prone to failure than others.
Overall, I would say that in my experience computers fail on a fairly regular basis but that
most of the failures I've seen could have been avoided by proper user maintenance.
R..
