Were batteries inside or outside the suit?
Venture heated vest...any experience?
- Thread starter Frontpointer1000
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Were batteries inside or outside the suit?
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but the failure was not the motorcycle vest and has nothing to do with the vest itself. The failure was in the battery pack and switch mechanism which is independent of the vest. The dive industry has used motorcycle vests for decades, dive vests are only a VERY recent product brought to market *last couple of years*. The advent of lithium batteries has brought the self-powered vests to the market, but the true motorcycle vests plug into the bikes electric system and don't have anything other than typically an on/off switch that is not used when diving.
The context of the screen shot from the FB group was someone asking if a jacket/vest heated with a battery inside it would be usable for diving with a drysuit. Said person did not want to pay upwards of $600 for a diving specific heated vest.
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and the answer to that is a resounding no, but in your initial response you said it was about motorcycle vests. The vests themselves are perfectly suitable, the integrated ones not so much. In fact, the Wet Mules who are one of the worlds leading cave diving teams, with most of them being divers on the Thai cave rescue only use motorcycle vests from Gerbing.
I wasn’t even aware there were ones that didn’t have integrated batteries.
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yup, so historically the vests themselves actually plug into cigarette lighters, though on motorcycles they're often plugged into a barrel connector that can often come straight off the battery. The integrated battery versions have only been out for a couple years.
So you'd use something like this to tap into the battery
or if you were using it in a car, or somewhere else with a free cig plug like this
Old school would then have a simple on off switch like this.
In the "real" dive vest sets, that harness/cig plug is replaced by the battery canisters which have similar voltage to that of a car *12v ish depending on chemistry*, and then the on/off switch was just the boot switch on the canister itself.
In the motorcycle world, the on/off switch was replaced by multi-output controllers. Nice because you have low/med/hi or however many options they gave you so you didn't have to flip it on, then get really hot, then off and get cold and repeat that vicious cycle. LM came out with the Pitkin controller which works the same way, but the downside to the Pitkin controller is if you set it on medium at say 50%, it's 50% of whatever the input voltage is. On a motorcycle that doesn't matter since the alternator voltage doesn't really change, but on a battery pack that means 50% at the start of the dive is very different than 50% at the end. UWLD took it a step farther and uses a constant output controller so 50% is 50% regardless of battery state of charge.
The controller/switch is optional on the motorcycle and you can just plug it straight in, but that makes turning it on/off rather annoying, so you should use them.
The next step in that development was having remote battery packs that use the same barrel connectors so if you are on a bike and have your layers sorted based on the fact that you have heat, but you then want to stop and walk around or whatever, you can plug the battery pack in and maintain heat. Also useful for non-bike activities or on something that you can't make the modification to the battery *rented bikes, snowmobiles, whatever, that don't have a cigarette outlet kind of situation.
Once lithium batteries became more energy-dense, vests that come with the battery/controller integrated to the vest itself came out. Pros and cons there since many of those can't plug into the 12v system of the vehicle, which also renders them non-usable with diving.
This is the vest that the wet-mules are using, and if you have a canister/thru-port on your drysuit, this is more than safe to use. It's not as ideal as the vests from Scubaforce that have been waterproofed, or the Exo2 panels that are carbon impregnated and can't short since there is no wires to beak and heat more evenly, but it's $150 and is more the sufficient.
https://www.gerbing.com/motorcycle-heated-vest-liner
Inside the suit.
@tbone1004's comment reminded me of my boss who had a heater in his motorcycle suit (as the traffic sucks as bad as the weather in Seattle) which he plugged into a power jack on his motorcycle.
If you search Amazon, there are a lot of heated jackets/vests with the integrated batteries. Venture makes them, too.
The diver got back to me and said:
I got a short in the motorcycle vest , which caused a fire that burned my skin , the base layer, the vest , the undergarment and the drysuit. Don’t know what caused the short , other than motorcycle vests are not designed for diving . I ended up with 2nd and 3rd degree burns in my neck, left shoulder and back . All to save $250, learned a big lesson , hope that others benefit from my story
Dang! Hope others see this and don’t cheap out, like the guy who asked the question on the FB group I saw.
if you don’t mind, I’m going to paste the above to the FB group.
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