What's in your pony?

[Sas]

If you don't, and whatever emergency required it's use, also requires any additional bottom time or you are near, close to, slightly over the no deco limit...and you don't have a multigas computer...set to what is in the pony bottle..you can do what Saspotato does...but if you want to do another dive (funny how it is difficult to really plan emergencies)..then you are hosed.

I was referring to doing longer stops on decompression dives in particular when I was discussing planning for bailing out to air. For NDL dive I would not worry.

 

[Jorgy]

I would only use air.........

I regularly deploy my pony to practice using it..........

At the safety stop, mostly but there have been many occasions where I switch to my pony just for fun and to check it......also due to pressurizing and then depressurizing it over a weekend of diving I use a couple hundred PSI.......

Therefore I am topping it off almost each time I get my tanks filled.......

If it were NITROX then it would be a real pain to drain and re-fill the tank, you could just top it off with clean air, but then the % O2 would drop with each fill so it becomes EAN21........

Not to mention the extra cost of O2 cleaning the pony..........

M

 

[drbill]

To me it depends greatly on the type of diving I do. I currently use air in my pony since I may exceed the MOD of most available Nitrox mixes. If I were just doing dives within the MOD of a certain mix, I might use Nitrox. Of course then I'd actually have to get Nitrox certified! Haven't really seen the need to do that yet.

 

[idocsteve]

To me it depends greatly on the type of diving I do. I currently use air in my pony since I may exceed the MOD of most available Nitrox mixes. yet.

Well this post would seem to support my post, where I questioned another poster that said use nitrox in the pony of at least, and possibly higher 02 percentage than your bottom gas.

I would suggest something at or higher than the highest Nitrox you would use.

I think the word should be "lower".

 

[jvevea]

I will be diving with a 40cf pony this season, for the first time. I have spoken to several people with different ideas of what should be in the pony, some say air, some say nitrox. What say you?

Most dives are in the 80-120 foot range along the mid atlantic. In my mind, if the pony is used something drastic happed to my buddy or myself and the dive terminated.

TIA

I generally carry EANx 50 in my pony. I most often dive solo with doubles. The doubles are for redundancy; the pony is to help with the offgassing, as my dives are usually somewhat deep (100+ feet).

 

[paddler3d]

If you're carrying it as a form of redundancy, go with air.

 

[Sas]

I generally carry EANx 50 in my pony. I most often dive solo with doubles. The doubles are for redundancy; the pony is to help with the offgassing, as my dives are usually somewhat deep (100+ feet).

I would consider that a deco bottle, not a pony... Pony is there for emergency (which I think the OP was getting at seeing as they said it was for if something drastic happened). I think people's definitions of things can be confusing. I have tended to use pony for bailout, deco bottle for accelerated decompression and stage tank for extending bottom time (though locally I have noticed this used a lot for decompression tanks).

But I'm not sure what is commonly accepted though...

 

[dumpsterDiver]

I use Air. Also, should a diver ever feel that oxygen toxicity were taking affect at depth on the primary tank (say bad mix), it might be really nice to be able to bail to air, which you are pretty sure IS a safe mix.

On the other hand, I also have a fill whip and will top off small pony bottles on the boat on multiday trips from the lowest mix nitrox bottle I have available (if there is no source for straight air).

Also, if you use nitrox and say you practice an ascent with the bottle, you might end up having to drain the entire bottle and buy a new partial pressure nitrox fill. If on the other hand, you practiced an ascent on the pony (or had a free flow or a slow leak) and used 1000 lbs of air, the dive shop is probably a lot more likely to top off the air bottle for FREE when they are filling your nitrox tanks.

Plus, trying to match the mix in the pony with your primary bottle can be a real pain (and potentially dangerous) if you dive a variety of depths and fill your primary bottle with varying mixes for your expected depth. This would then force you to dump and remix (or dilute the mix) on the pony each time you dive. Having air in the pony bottle is just simpler and avoids having to remix it and a lot of other complexities.

I normally don't even check the pressure in my pony bottle before a dive, when I am getting my primary tanks filled, I just carry it into the dive shop, hook it to the whip and top it off with air, since it is usually down a few hundred psi from leaks etc. after each trip (especially the 6 and 13 cu-ft bottles). No draining of bottle, no checking of mix and very little potential for getting the wrong mix.

 

[Dr Wu]

Mine is probably filled with rust. Not a problem tho as it's heavy enought to do the job it was designed for: Keeping the door to my garage from swinging shut.

 

[Codiak]

You have an OOA emergency at depth, you switch to the pony, which has been filled with EAN36, you spend some time at that depth figuring it all out, and WHAMO, you get an O2 Toxicity hit because the Nitrox in your Pony is not adequate for that depth.

What am I missing here?

Not sure what we're spending time on...
We bailed to pony we're going up... it was in the dive plan.



Oh and it's the same mix on my back or Air