Broke even CCR vs OC fills costs!

[Superlyte27]

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I thought a scrubber only have 3-5 hours life but you will do 10 hours... Also once you have extended your stay on a CCR will your bailout also magically increase to cater for the new 5-10hour additional time? The accelerated bailout profile used by CCR divers to exit is generally aggresive and dont cater for any delays getting to the surface.

Depends on your scrubber. None of the rebreathers I'm certified on have a 3 hour scrubber.

 

[Superlyte27]

How often do you miss dives on CCR due to issues as compared to OC missing dives -thats a cost if your half way through your trip.

As far as I can tell, that's a myth. I'm certified on 5 different rebreathers for more than 5 years now. In that time, I've never missed a dive because of a faulty rebreather. So far just this year, I have over 130 hours on the loop. Which is probably one of my weakest years in terms of diving. I have 7 close friends who also dive CCR exclusively. They have also never missed a dive due to a faulty rebreather.

I do have a single friend who couldn't dive because his Oxygen sensor had expired and he didn't have a spare. But to me, that's just bad maintenance or poor planning. Kinda like having a regulator fail that hasn't been serviced in 5 years.

 

[Brandon]

Would love to know what boat you have to get that number. In South Florida, a single dive trip is what it would cost in fuel alone, if I still had a boat.

But I'm not in South Florida, am I?

A Southcentral Alaska dive charter will cost you about $250 for a 2-tank dive day, or about $450 for the weekend. That's on the cheap side. There are also charters where it would cost you $350 to $500 for a single day of diving. Look at your math again - if your local charter rates were that expensive and you dove frequently, would it be worth owning a boat?

I took my boat out 31 times this year, and even after accounting for ownership costs, I'm way ahead.

I did this back when I first got a rebreather. I just did the math again... It costs me about $6/hour to dive a CCR, pretty much regardless of depth. Here's my numbers... You can do the math...please correct me if I'm wrong. I did this while watching a movie with the wife and kids, patiently awaiting a hurricane.

This is an excellent example on how to accurately cost out CCR vs OC. You did the math the same way I did it for determining if my own fill station was viable, by looking at cost per CF for the OC gasses.

I haven't yet reached the point where I'm going through 22,000 CF of trimix in a year... #lifegoals.

 

[ajduplessis]

Depends on your scrubber. None of the rebreathers I'm certified on have a 3 hour scrubber.

Do you then have 10 hour scrubbers?

 

[JohnnyC]

Scrubber life depends on a myriad of factors. Check out ISC's figures for the different size Meg scrubbers and you'll see how they rate theirs.

They rate them quite conservatively. A manufacturer may quote a scrubbers duration at 4 hours even when it's capable of doing 10 given reasonable relaxed workload.

A good example is the Meg 8lb radial. It's rated for a much shorter duration by the manufacturer, but it was used 10 hours in Plurdalen when those guys had that accident. Manufacturer ratings are very conservative by design. It's really up to the diver to determine how long they want to push their scrubber.

 

[ajduplessis]

I am amazed how CCR divers talk about break even cost vs OC and how cheap it is to dive a CCR, yet "inexpensive" consumables like O2 sensors and sorb is dived beyond the recommendations of the manufactures.

 

[LiteHedded]

I am amazed how CCR divers talk about break even cost vs OC and how cheap it is to dive a CCR, yet "inexpensive" consumables like O2 sensors and sorb is dived beyond the recommendations of the manufactures.

that's nothing new. when cheapness is a motivating factor for buying the thing you'll see nonsense like this

 

[Superlyte27]

Do you then have 10 hour scrubbers?

Yes, two of my ccrs have 10 hour scrubbers.

 

[TrimixToo]

There was a post many years ago now from a diver who got lost in a silted out room in a wreck. As he was on a rebreather, he was able to calmly wait until the silt subsided enough that he could see the way out and survived. That was a very powerful story to me.

The problem with rebreathers IMO comes down to one of inexperience or complacency. One or other is almost almost always implicated in RB fatalities.

Not to take anything away from having several hours to deal with things on CCR, which to me is one of the compelling arguments for getting one, but why the heck did he not run a line?

Losing orientation in a silted-out compartment (or a very tight silty passage) is not unusual, but the line always gets you out approximately as fast as you went in or faster, assuming you know how to run one to avoid line traps and such. Even on CCR, that's safer than having to wait for the silt to settle, and for some kinds of silt, it could be several hours before it does.

 

[lermontov]

Not to take anything away from having several hours to deal with things on CCR, which to me is one of the compelling arguments for getting one, but why the heck did he not run a line?

Losing orientation in a silted-out compartment (or a very tight silty passage) is not unusual, but the line always gets you out approximately as fast as you went in or faster, assuming you know how to run one to avoid line traps and such. Even on CCR, that's safer than having to wait for the silt to settle, and for some kinds of silt, it could be several hours before it does.

i did read a story which may or not be the same one about someone who went into a room as a solo diver and was later followed in by another team who weren't so careful and that caused the silt out - either way its a good lesson not to take unnecessary risks