Quote Originally Posted by Bubbletrubble View Post
@Scuba_Noob: Rather than milking out the air in the arm region of your drysuit, you should just consider adding a couple of more pounds of ballast to your setup. This would allow you to run more air inside your suit and make it easy to dump the proper amount during your ascent at the end of the dive.

Reading all of the Scubaboard threads on proper weighting might lead a beginner to believe that being a couple of pounds "heavy" is a no-no. However, in a drysuit, the gas to balance out an extra couple of pounds of ballast can be evenly distributed throughout the suit. As you get better at managing the drysuit bubble, you'll find that, in most recreational open water situations, keeping more air in your suit (beyond just enough to offset squeeze...but not too much) will allow you to have better trim control, assuming that your drysuit fits properly.

FWIW, I'm a single-tank recreational diver who uses a Bare Nex-Gen. I find that for the typical dives I do in the 50-70 fsw range, the amount of drysuit gas needed to offset squeeze is just about the right amount to achieve neutral buoyancy. Essentially, I'm not using my BCD at all underwater. If I were diving doubles or cave diving, I'd almost certainly choose to manage the drysuit bubble differently.
Yep I agree. When I first started diving dry I was trying to keep minimal air in the suit and still using the BCD as well for buoyancy. I also tried to reduce weight to bare minimum.
Now I dive using mainly the suit for buoyancy. This means slightly more air in the suit = warmer and much easier to dump air. I also find it more convenient to be able to vent with a gentle roll if both hands are busy during an ascent, rather than reaching for a BCD dump.

The BCD is still there though for situations where excess air in the suit can be a problem e.g vertical ascent from a wreck where air may leak from the neck seal of the suit uncontrollably.