Do NOT rent regulators

[ReefHound]

Love this one - this is the "dangerous sport" attitude I just love about some divers. While it is possible and pretty simple to kill yourself diving it is also pretty easy to go diving on vacation and have a great time and come nowhere near killing yourself. Particularly if you are comfortable in the water.

Glad you love it. Scuba diving is an easy sport and even novices with poor skills can go diving on vacation and have a great time and not hurt themselves - when things go right. Which is most of the time. It's when things don't go right that training and experiences makes the difference.

Yes it is a good idea to get an easy brush up dive in before you do anything - but not doing so is extremely unlikely to kill you and neither is having a rental reg. Again - particulalry if you are very comfortable in the water.

And driving home drunk from a bar is unlikely to kill you as well. After all, millions of people do it every weekend and get away with it. That doesn't make it safe or prudent.

 

[Pre BC]

I have to admit that I never travel without my reg. The miracle of scuba diving is that the gear is amazingly reliable and inexpensive. In what other sport or hobby can you buy equipment that will really keep you alive for less than the price of a Callaway driver. It amazes me how many people who golf and scuba dive will spend $700 on a graphite driver without a moment's care and then take a pass on buying a regulator because it is $300-$500.

Virtually every full line manufacturer of scuba gear has a regulator that is both excellent and incredibly affordable... Focusing on whether new divers are smart enough to buy the right regulator further mystifies scuba and makes the sport less attractive. Instead, we should be letting students/new divers know that they have many great choices and they just need to pick one of them... Any of them!

 

[RIVIDIVER]

I could not agree more with Ardy about safety and comfortable equip... than owning your own!

I completely disagree on buying seconds on ebay though - for obvious reasons (and my own bad experiences)

Please read through and you will agree with me too in the end.


One does not have to buy all the equip. all at once - I certainly didn't! (and therefore I also had to rent till I got all my equip. - many brands for months on end... and I was shocked with what I was given to dive with!)
So, I recommend you to buy a piece every few months or so. (or even one expensive piece every year).
My first 'big' investment was my BC, I was so proud and (still) happy with it I still dive with it almost 8 years later. Then I bought some affordable regs. and next an affordable wet suit. 1 year later I had my complete equip. with UW camera & strobe etc.

So if you dive more than 6 times a year or so, I'll advise you to do the same. (without the UW camera if you're not hat keen, of course).
Specially because if you're not very experienced you would certainly benefit from an equip. you know and use AND it's your size, comfortably, not 2 sizes too big or small!
There's nothing more comfortable than wearing your own size clothes, the same goes for safety - There's nothing safer than your own equip. that ONLY YOU clean, service and know it inside out!

I have travelled around the world diving and always took my own equip. and I have seen more rented equip. failing than anything else! although it only caused divers to cancel their dives (what a pain if you paid thousands on a live-aboard for once in a life time dive holiday to the Great Barrier Reef or similar) or other times wait for the replacement equip. and therefore delay your dive...
- I certainly would not like to imagine the worst.

The reason I go through the LITTLE extra care and expense of checking-in my complete dive gear wherever I travel to (although lots of airlines nowadays do take your scuba gear for FREE if you present your PADI Card) it's because I like the fact I know my equip inside out, with my eyes closed!

And this along was enough to help me out of many situations where once a dive leader left me behind on a cenote/cave in Mexico (where there is no natural light coming through), later on other dive in South Africa due to very strong currents my group got all separated and I got to face a 3m long Bull/Zambezi shark, literally at an arm's length from me, another time in Australia, during my Nitrox course, I was given dodgy rental tanks labelled 'Enriched Air' when this was not the case! And the 'common' air tank was in fact the Nitrox one...!
- Oh, and another time in Egypt, I noticed a diver on my group had her regs/tank leaking quite considerably, and when I got the dive leader's attention, he told us they didn't bring any spare rentals and the diver went diving with a leaking equip anyway...!
No need to say, she run out of air pretty quickly and had to surface aborting the dive for the rest of us. - I was not happy! - The same reason when I finally saved up for a long time, for my first GBR live-aboard, I wanted to be sure I was not another diver being left behind when the 'season for lost divers' just started again in Australia.
So I got an auto inflate sausage/marker buoy and beam lights just in case.

All I'm trying to say is there's not many people I trust my life with! And although many swear diving can be a huge risk in it self (including dive insurance's who do not cover you if you're deeper that 20m) I know from good experience, diving is not more dangerous than driving my car or riding my bike (where I've been victim of hit and run). But I rather make sure I do what I can, to come back alive to shore so I can soon go back in!
And this means having my own equip. that I know inside out and I am very comfortable with, so I don't need to stress underwater with a rental equip. when something does not work properly (I have seen it too many times) and one could not be familiar with it. And also of course keep dive training up to date, OR at least dive as much I can, not just for the cheer fun and enjoyment, but to get experience too.

I personally, would not EVER trust my life on a dubious rental diving equip.
- Not after many years of seeing too many renowned professional dive centres worldwide, disregarding the cleaning, maintenance and servicing of their own rental equip. and also, selling ex-rental equip. at a profit (after making the money with rentals 10x over) and not even servicing it before selling it.

This is my experience, and I choose not to risk any more than I have to, by going in the water, into an environment that is not mine!

...but oh boy, I really love diving...


Safe diving,
RV

 

[Anti-Hero]

You can neglect a regulator for years and it will work perfectly, or you can get it serviced and it fails the very next dive. Saying rental gear is "dubious" is an unfair statement.

Off the top of your head make a guess: How many people are under water _today_ using rental gear? My guess is somewhere in the thousands.

Now how many of those people had catastrophic failure? Who knows, but I bet it was a tiny percent. And of that tiny fraction, how many were injured or killed? I bet the fraction gets REALLY small now.

 

[nuisancepilot0]

As a newbie I was very appriciative of my LDS's recommendatation to rotate through all of their rental equipment during my certification process. As point of fact, unless you owned your own, they swapped equipment assignments ahead of time to ensure everyone got to try everything they had at least once. After trying out all of the new and more used equipment I figured out what I liked and disliked from several manufacturers of BCs, regs, comps etc.. I personally don't like to rent so on to E-bay.

After hours and hours of further research I did buy my BC and regs(with computer) off of E-bay only to find out from said LDS they can't get replacement parts anymore for my primary. Obviously not enough time. So far I've not had any problems with regular cleaning (unless you count losing a snorkel), but the stuff was very lightly used.

I'm not really sure if I've saved anything since replacement is probably going to have to be sooner rather than later. Since life safety is an issue, from now on, I'll err on the side of caution and go brand new with the LDS. For new divers one of the best things you can get is experience and advice by listening to people that have already been there. Just make sure it's the shop you can trust. You may pay a little more but isn't one of the best parts of diving the people we get to hang with?

 

[Buoyant1]

Why go to Ebay...there are a lot of closeouts on Dive shop sites, and at dive shops..I'd rather buy from there rather than Ebay!

I think as a blanket statement you're out of the water on this. Sure there are exceptions, but on the whole, most places keep their rental gear serviced and ready to roll, at least the shops and ops that I've encountered seem to do so. Anyway, how are you going to try different brands if you DON'T rent!

If you are in doubt, ask when the reg was serviced, if you think it's "gross" to use a rental, take your own disinfectant...easy solutions to the problems!

 

[dgangi]

I somewhat agree with the OP...but not in the sense that rental gear can be dangerous. My big issue with renting gear is that you are venturing into the "unknown".

All of you have stated that renting gear from a reputable dive shop is fine. I agree. But what constitutes "reputable"? If I am going to a dive destination I have never been before, I can spend lots of time on-line doing research on the local dive shops and I might even call a few of them, but how do I know how they treat their rental gear? I don't. Maybe the past 3 months have been especially slow so the dive shop is taking short-cuts with the maintenance on their gear in order to stay in the black. Or maybe they just hired a new tech who doesn't know what he/she is doing. Or maybe the dive shop is doing great and regularly maintains their gear with knowledgeable techs. Who knows -- it's all a crap-shoot, and that's a gamble I have never been willing to take.

Another issue is one that many others have mentioned -- and that's unfamiliarity with the gear. When it comes to using my equipment, I want it second nature, knowing where the knobs/dials are and what they all do (especially with dive computers). Renting different brands of gear forces me to "re-learn" the equipment on each trip, and for some people (including me) that creates additional stress to the stress of diving itself.

Now as far as buying equipment from eBay, Craigslist, or the classifieds...I have no idea why anybody would be against this! Why wouldn't I buy used gear?? The only catch is that anybody who buys used gear MUST get it inspected/serviced by their LDS after the purchase...more or less as a way to have it "certified". People who don't do this are asking for trouble...but people who do...are getting good dive gear at a bargain.

I've bought 4 used regulators, 2 used BC's, and 2 used computers with 100% success over 10 years. Now when I do buy this used gear, I plan on adding $50-$100 to the purchase price to bring it to my LDS for servicing. So once it's serviced I own a piece of used gear that has been thoroughly been inspected and serviced by my LDS (which means it has new parts, o-rings, etc)...and is essentially as good a new in my book.

And lastly...as another poster suggested...I always take my gear to my LDS for a dip in the pool before any dive trip. I do this for 2 reasons -- check out my gear to make sure it is all working AND get back into the mentality of diving. Better safe than sorry.

So...for me...owning my own gear gives me piece of mind becuse I KNOW how well it's been treated/maintained and is comfortable/familiar to me. For the cost of my gear (which most of which was purchased used), it all makes sense...to me anyway. YMMV.

Thx...Doug

 

[mike_s]

I'm beginning to think the OP started this thread as a troll and is just sitting back watching the arguement.....

 

[wally2]

An interesting thread and subject. I have read most of the replies and found some very interesting. First, I have been diving since the early 90s and am a NAUI Instructor. In all my diving I have never been an actual witness to a serious regulator failure. However, I have been on dives where a fellow divers regulator failed to function as designed.

On one of our recent dive trips my diving buddies regulator became very difficult to breath at depths around 100 feet. We had it serviced when we got home and there was a simple problem with the regulator that prevented it from operating properly. Still the regulator delivered sufficient air even under this situation.

However, I will say that my experience is probably not the ordinary experience. Most of my diving is with people I know and who I think are safe divers. We don't knowingly dive with people we don't think are safe divers. Most of my diving friends are all experienced divers with hundreds of dives and who practice continuing diving education.

The above brings me to the point that I want to make and that is that the DAN statistics show that the most likely group of people to experience a diving accident are those who are beginning open water divers and who do one or fewer dive trips a year. They are those divers who have the minimal training and who have the least diving experience. As I read this thread, my thought was that they are seemingly the same group of people who are the most likely to rent their equipment and/or buy their equipment from some source like eBay.

Now while I have never been a personal witness to serious regulator failure, I have heard lots of horror stories from friends and casual acquaintances. All, as in 100% of these horror stories come from people who have used rental regulators and BCs. I know of a father/son who both experienced regulator failure and the son BC failure on a short trip to Cozumel. I know of a lady who almost drowned by rental regulator failure. I have a friend who bought his regulator and computer from eBay. His $350 Sherwood Wisdom computer flooded on his first dive. Had it not been that I was in a dive shop at the time, he would have lost that investment. I Know of a man who bought tanks and regulators from eBay. All four of his tanks were condemned when we sent them for a hydro. There are more.

Now, I know dive shops all over the world that I think are very good operations and there are a few that I might trust their equipment, but I think in general you are risking your life with rental regulators and BCs.

If I don't have the money to invest $1000 - $1200 in a good regulator and BC then I just won't dive, period. Your regulator is single most important piece of dive safety equipment. If you think so little of your life to trust it to some rental gear then I don't think I need to be diving, period. The BC is the 2nd most important piece of equipment.

Bottomline is that scuba isn't for everyone. And, if you don't have the money to purchase safe equipment and have it serviced on a regular basis then diving probably isn't for you, just my opinion.

 

[GrandpaScuba]

The original post seems a bit alarmist. Yes, you have to be a cautious consumer if you rent regulators or BC. But you just need to assure yourself that the business that you have selected to patronize takes good care of their rental equipment and then the failure rate probably isn't any worse than your own equipment.

BTW-The store where I teach buys all new regs and BC's each year and sells the old ones as used.