Order of Equipment Purchases?

New to diving; just finished my advanced cert and am now considering purchase of more important equipment (reg, octo, gauges, BC, etc...). Have most other stuff (fins, mask, compass, etc...).

My question is twofold. First, since I don't want to spend a ton of cash in one outlay, in what order should I purchase my gear [reg, then octo (or integrated BC), then ...]? Second, should I spend a few more dollars to get 'technical' quality gear even though the most advanced diving I honestly see myself doing is at most wreck penetration in Florida-temperature water?

Thanks for your thoughts.

Personally I'd recommend purchasing reg/octo/spg first. The reg is a fairly personal item since you're sticking it in your mouth and the performance of the reg and the tendency of the octo to freeflow can really make a difference in your diving happiness. I'd also get a computer and/or bottom timer/depth gauge as many places won't rent just a computer - it'll be with the reg/octo/spg. If you can't afford all four items I guess I'd go for the BCD. That way you can rent the rest of the equipment in a single bundle and not mess with having just a reg but no octo and having to do something weird like rent just an octo.

As for the tech quality gear... I believe tech diving is more about the type and combination of gear than it is about quality. If you're diving in cold water make sure your reg is environmentally sealed. Check reviews and get equipment that you feel good about. If you're going to do wreck penetration make sure you're appropriately trained and make sure your equipment is streamlined and appropriate for a relatively (compared to open water diving) dangerous undertaking.

1: Exposure protection - bet it wet suit or dry suit
2: B/C
3: Regulators/gauges

And here is my rationale:

Here's a post I placed in a similar thread:
Just for the sake of reason, here's why I choose the order I do:

Exposure protection:
Having a properly fitting and sufficiently insulation exposure suit keeps one warm and allows one to focus, more clearly, at the new tasks being learned. Secondly, the exposure suit has, by inherent design, more effect upon one's buoyancy. Becoming accustomed to the buoyancy characteristics of one's wet suit will help one "master", more quickly, control of buoyancy.

Renting different wet/dry suits can cause the diver to change, constantly, the amount of weight required to dive and can result in other areas of concern, such as trim. Plus it's probably been peed in a lot.

B/C:
The b/c is an item that, while it has a more exaggerated effecty upon one's buoyancy when operated, has somewhat of a lesser effect while diving at depth. Purchasing the B/C early in the game allows the user to become intimately familiar, sooner, with all of the clamps, clasps, d-rings, pockets, etc., etc., etc. Familiarity with this piece of gear will allow the diver to complete simple tasks without effecting the buoyancy element of the diving equation.

Hereagain, renting a B/C will probably result in the diver using a different make/model of B/C in many cases and leading to confusion when trying to make adjustments.

Regs:
While many posters lambaste the quality of rental regs, they seem to be referring most frequently to those dive regs provided by operators in the warm, fuzzy areas of the world. For the most part, local dive shops do a pretty good job of maintaining rental regs. The LDS's fear of expensive litigation can be a good friend on the part of divers renting gear. The force required to get air from a reg is not a significant factor in buoyancy, and the new diver, without a great deal of experience in using differing regulators, will probably not notice the difference between one rental regulator and another.


the K

I gotta go with the K - I was mulling this over even before I saw beakman's post, and I came up with the same list.

Exposure suit is so important. You gotta be comfy down there. Even with the best reg and simplest BP/w set up, if you're teeth are chattering it will not be a fun dive.

Cheap wetsuits suck. If you're gonna go wet, get a nice suit. Are you in cold water?

Get a BP/W - you'll never outgrow it no matter what kind of diving you do, no matter how much weight you gain or lose over the next 10 years.

Regs - you'll just keep upgrading until you get to Atomic, Apeks or ScubaPro. You can get one of those now or spend your cash on something you'll eBay later.

---
Ken

I'll also agree with The Kraken.

Buy the things that have to fit first. If you show up in Cayman to dive, and you need a reg... they can rent you any reg they have... If you need a large BC, and they only have small... you're out of luck!

In fact we get asked this question so often, I wrote up a whole page on our site for it: http://www.scubatoys.com/store/joelarry/bcorreg.asp

Reg/octo/computer/spg top my list. This is your most important peice of gear and also the most expensive. You want to have gear that you are comfortable with and understand how to use. I've seen plenty of people with rental computers that have no idea how to use them. That's a little dangerous. A wetsuit would also be at the top of the list. However, after spending hundreds on your reg setup, a hundred bucks more for a wetsuit won't even be noticable, lol.

As far as your question on spending more for tech quality gear, if you plan on doing any pentetration, regardless of where you plan on diving, tech gear is highly advisable. All wrecks can be dangerous. Even those in warm water.

J.

I'm with you on the rental computer concerns. My buddy ended up with a Dive-rite that has o2 percentage as part of the dive setup and my buddy set his mix to 33% without knowing it. Well, needless to say he ended up with a pO2 alarm and the quandry as to whether or not to continue on to the next dive. Of course his nitrogen saturation was completely off as well. Because the next dive was only in the 25 foot area, and he was previously glued to my hip, we dove but stayed ultra conservative. I found out what our absolute max accumilation could have been if we had originally dove tables and planned from there.

I would concur with going exposure suit first if you think you'll be diving in the same temps for the majority of the time. There's no sense in investing in a 7mm for a dive up north when 80% of your diving will actually be in the Carribbean. My most-used exposure suit is a 3/2 full because I use it in anything warmer than 70 degrees.

Bobby

I can tell you the order I ended up with:

1) Wetsuit - for the reasons very well explained above

2) Computer - because I wanted to be able to start tracking all my dives. I prefer a wrist mounted computer. If you want an integrated computer, I'd probably put it between the reg and the BC.

3) Reg / Octo / SPG - makes sense to buy all at once - can't really use just the reg without an octo and SPG - and it's hard to rent and attach an octo to your reg everytime you want to dive. I may be a little anal about this, but I don't like putting something in my mouth that a whole bunch of other people have allready. I also found that some of the rental Regs I got were dicey - one in Monterey California even had half the mouthpiece bitten off and didn't have a spare one on the boat so I spent the whole dive literally holding my reg in my mouth.

4) BC - Scubatoys makes a good point about fit, but I've found this was the easiest one to rent inexpensively and get decent quality everywhere I went. I'm a L though, so maybe that's just the most common size.

I actually bought 3 & 4 together as a package, but if I were going to split them up, that's the order I'd do them in.

I can tell you that I'm far happier diving with my own gear - knowing exactly how everything works and being able to tweak the setup dive to dive made a big difference.

Good luck.

Good info for the new diver here. I agree with going with things that need to fit. COmputer should be last on the list, if ever.

I'll give a somewhat different answer. I think you should dive a bit, do your research, put together your list of what exactly you want to buy, and understand how the whole system will work together. Don't just research a reg, buy it, then try to figure out what bc you want. Once you know exactly what you want for every piece of gear and you know that that setup will fit your needs today and for the foreseeable future, then start looking out for bargains.

I started out with the idea that I was going to buy things in a certain order, but then I found an awesome deal on a drysuit. I jumped on it even though it wasn't the next thing on the list. I had the confidence to do this because I had already done my research and knew that this was exactly the drysuit I wanted. It threw off the timing a bit on the bp/w but it all worked out in the end. I've now got all the gear I wanted and I got some great deals by knowing exactly what I wanted and being prepared to jump on great deals when they materialized. It may mean that you may not be able to dive a certain piece of gear as soon as you buy it, though. For example, I bought a reg on a fantastic sale, but had to wait a bit to buy the spg, hoses and backup so the reg sat for a bit. It killed me to see it sitting there, but again I saved a ton of money. Just my $0.02.

-John