Thermalution Yellow Grade

[Texasguy]

Have you tried pissing into the suit? Makes it all warm for a while, cheaper too, but same yellow grade... Probably stolen technology.

 

[aaen]

Haha




Steve

 

[BRT]

My wife Sandra has been using a thermolution vest for over a year now, and the most amazing thing to me, is why this product has not been heralded as the next best way to dive by the diving masses yet!
Suddenly, we have it in our reach, to use an exposure suit with no bouyancy or bouyancy shift with depth, with one of these under it, and be completely warm for the dive, and the time on the boat during surface interval..
As an evolutionary direction, this is light years beyond dry suits or wetuits.
Now if someone can develop a tank with little or no bouyancy shift from full to 500 psi, there would no longer be any need at all to use a stinking BC or wing.

This would mean twice the speed at half the effort.

I kind of think it will take more watt-hours than current batteries have to keep you warm with out air for insulation. And I'm pretty sure that air in a tank will continue to have weight.

 

[danvolker]

I kind of think it will take more watt-hours than current batteries have to keep you warm with out air for insulation. And I'm pretty sure that air in a tank will continue to have weight.

If you ever try one of the old steel 72 cu ft tanks, they weigh very little on the surface, are at most a pound or 2 negative when full, and are essentially neutral when near empty....In other words, there was no need for an "equipment solution" like the BC to compensate for tank buoyancy shifts.....Wet suits on the other hand, had large swing in the past, but today there are quite a few tech fabric suits with thermal insulating potentials that can mate with an electric heated shirt to create an exposure suit solution that can be superior to a wetsuit in all ways. An example is a suit like the "Thermocline - Neutrally Buoyant Wetsuit" by 4th Element...No Neoprene, just high tech fabrics, but it insulates as well as a 2 to 3 mm wetsuit....when you add a Thermulution Heated undergarment to it, the heat is kept in...Choice of battery and which heated undergarment can give you either recreational dive durations, or technical dive durations. For a 140 foot deep or 200 foot deep dive, you would find a hybrid suit like this much warmer than a 7 mil ( which becomes paper thin at 200 feet and without significant thermal value).

As you pointed out, the biggest issue is what tank to use, to avoid the big swing.
Steel 72's are hard to come by, and even though roughly equivalent to an Al 80, many divers "think" they need a much larger tank....Of course, when a dive shop piles a huge, high drag jacket BC on a diver, an extra 35 pounds of lead, a half dozen hoses and guages and dangly things adding even more drag, along with thick wetsuit or pufferfish-like dry suit....the diver HAS TO work so hard to swim through the water, they actually DO need a lot more air to swim around, and the steel 72 would not get the job done.
The same diver, ultra slick, may well find their heart rate stays at a resting pulse throughout the dive, they move without effort, and that the 72 lasts much longer than an hp100 with the big pufferfish like BC and drysuit solution.

 

[BRT]

A steel 72 doesn't change much because it doesn't hold much air. An AL40 would change less. A steel 72 still changes 5.6 lbs from full to empty. This is physics and can't be engineered around without adding flotation when the tank is full. In warm water I dive one of the "new" non buoyant suits and like it because I don't have to adjust for it. In cold water it still takes a gas to make insulation, and gases compress and expand.

 

[danvolker]

A steel 72 doesn't change much because it doesn't hold much air. An AL40 would change less. A steel 72 still changes 5.6 lbs from full to empty. This is physics and can't be engineered around without adding flotation when the tank is full..

Rather than the jacket or wing, I'd rather have a tank "boot" that could be 6 pounds buoyant with the full tank, then you "dump" air out of it as needed throughout the dive...A longer tank of the same diameter, does not add drag to the diver...think of it like hull length on sailboats or motor boats...longer is actually faster.

The amount of leverage a buoyant tank boot would exert, may or may not be a problem.....there are an awful lot of recreational divers, that are always swimming head up, feet down, and this is weighting and trim related--for this group, the boot leverage might be a great thing

I have seen many Dry suit divers using a 6 pound Brownie Tank weight, belted on to the bottom of their tank..the weight and it's leverage there is enough to assist them in not having their feet get too light ( a problem for so,e drysuit divers)...Point being, 6 pounds of force at the bottom of the tank, exerts only a moderate amount of rotational force to the diver--so this may be well within the optimal trim and weighting configurations a diver would use with this buoyant "tank boot" set up..

If it works, presto, no problem with tank buoyancy shifts ( no need for a BC for tank), and for the tropics at least, a heated vest and high tech fabric suited diver would no longer need or desire a BC or wing.

For water colder than 65 degrees, I think that Thermulution would have to make a denser weave of heating elements( whatever they use) that covers the entire body of the diver ( still insulated with the high tech fabric outer like 4th dimension and others make), and they would need to use a battery more like the Can light that Cave divers use...or....Get someone like Eric Sedletzky of Freedom Plates to make a backplate that contains batteries throughout it's structure....allowing as much or more stored power as a big video can light battery. Maybe Eric ought to start talking to Matt Patton of HeatedWetsuits.com

 

[BRT]

So maybe to avoid all tanks having the complexity of automatic compensation the tank holder could do that for any tank? And then for surface flotation after the dive or when a diver gets in trouble we could have a manual control. And for a cheaper option we could develop one that was full manual control. And call it a Buoyancy Compensating Device?

I'm just having you on. I enjoy my warm water diving without neoprene compression. I have done a number of dives with Mexican fishermen friends. They don't take anything that they are not going to use on THIS DIVE. They are slick and can move like crazy underwater. When the boat loses them they just swim to shore if they are able. I kind of like having a place for my fold up snorkel that I have used exactly once, when a boat disappeared, my light, my thumb reel and sausage, also seldom used, my hidden illicit dive knife that I have never used in warm water, and my illicit pair of gloves to use if I have to hang on a rope or a rock in case of ugly unexpected currents. I also like to inflate my BCD when I hit the surface because it just seems easier than swimming to keep my nose out of water. But it all does slow me down.

 

[Eric Sedletzky]

I saw this post and can add value.
With the concerns over tank swing and thicker wetsuits with minimalist diving (no BC).
I dive here in Northern California, our water is between 46 and 53 degrees year around. Lately I've been using a Yazbeck 7mm freediving suit for scuba minimalism.
These are my personal findings with tank swing. I use primarily steel 72's for backpack diving. The weight swing is about 5 lbs. (already mentioned). At the start of the dive with a full tank I can easily float on the surface. I have to duck dive (pike) head first and swim down. The way I weight myself for most of the depths I dive, I break neutral about 20 or 25 feet at the start. I can control buoyuancy deeper with lungs. I found that the suit will crush more as time goes by, combined with the fact that as the suit cools in our cold waters the bubbles in the suit also shrink further making the suit less buoyant. So as the air is used up the suit actually is gradually losing bouyancy, so the two trade off. The actual gain in bouyancy at the end of the dive may only be a couple lbs, not necessarily the whole 5+ lbs of air used. That small change can easily be adjusted for with breathing.
But the idea of a heated suit with no buoyancy or very little, is magical for a minimalist.

The steel 72 is also one of the best tanks ever made for the type of diving I do. Pump it up to 3000 and you've got an 86.

 

[aaen]

So back on topic, the batteries work on this vest and it is heating up nicely. Time for a test dive here tonight. Hopefully this sucker continues to work or its in the bin and I buy what I should have bought from the start.




Steve

 

[aaen]

Tried flipping the vest around last night so the heating element and the receiver were on the front. Let's just say this works much better then having the heat on the back your chest stays nice and toasty warm and the heat migrated to your back. Not to mention little to no interference btw the receiver and remote. Although it still doesn't work perfectly well at least mine.

Oddly, I ran into a couple on the weekend that have the new ones (with wireless charger for the remote)and are having the exact same issues we all are. Hers was back 2 times in 3 months. They are also from the U.S. and not from Canada so different distributor.

Im just glad mine is working again for how long I am not sure but right now I am getting 2 hr dives in and staying warm. Time to find a new glove liner however as my hands/fingertips are back to getting cold.








Steve