Why Don't Manufacturers

[friscuba]

There is a unit out there that will do exactly what your looking for. It's kind of grayish, about as big as a medium size ball and can be very fail safe if you let it.

It's called a brain. Use it wisely and check your own air from time to time. Relying on mechanical devices to tell you where your air is will not make your dive safer. It will work the other way. The more stuff you place in the system the more fail points you have.

Just use the thing nature placed on your shoulders. It's free and easy to use.

Gary D.

That's probably the best single all purpose answer (although a hair negative) I've seen on any scuba message board.

 

[YCW]

I was wondering one day why manufacturers don't put some kind of signal into regulators to let us know that our air is getting low. Or to make a comuter that gives us a signal. I am a fire fighter and I when I am fire fighting and wearing my mask and regulator, it has a low air alarm that goes off when my bottle is down to 500psi. Why don't SCUBA equipment manufacturers borrow some ideas from the fire department and help keep us a little safer?
Dive Safe!
Alanna

It will be great for newbies who may forget to check their air from time to time....

Anyway, IMO any extra safety feature on dive equipment is always good.

 

[miketsp]

KISS
I want my basic regulator to be as simple as possible with as few moving parts as possible in order to keep the MTBF as high as possible.
The rest are trimmings and you can add as many as your pocket can pay for - as long as their failure doesn't stop the air from flowing.
As others already stated, just go air integrated and you can have the trimmings you want.
Personally, I'll stick with my simple SPG and keep exercising my grey matter.

 

[deadend]

Another viable thread met with holier-than-thou negativity.

There is a unit out there that will do exactly what your looking for. It's kind of grayish, about as big as a medium size ball and can be very fail safe if you let it.

It's called a brain. Use it wisely and check your own air from time to time. Relying on mechanical devices to tell you where your air is will not make your dive safer. It will work the other way. The more stuff you place in the system the more fail points you have.

Just use the thing nature placed on your shoulders. It's free and easy to use.

Gary D.

 

[miketsp]

..snip..
Anyway, IMO any extra safety feature on dive equipment is always good.

Extra feature = extra complexity.
Extra complexity = lower reliability.
To restore reliability (if possible) = redundancy / better materials / increased quality process.
All of which leads to increased cost.
ie. You get what you pay for.

Unless of course by building a better mousetrap, the world beats a path to your door, you sell more and then get economy of production scale.

 

[bullshark]

It's an automatic safeguard to keep the ranks of divers limited to those with the sense to check their SPG from time to time.

 

[DA Aquamaster]

I still have and use my Scubapro Mk VII "honker" that was purchased new in 1978. It's my 'recreational' set up and breathes every bit as well as my new Atomic M1's.

Extra feature = extra complexity.
Extra complexity = lower reliability.
To restore reliability (if possible) = redundancy / better materials / increased quality process.
All of which leads to increased cost.
ie. You get what you pay for.

The Mk VII used the MK V piston and associated internals and added the honking feature along side. The resulting regulator was large, heavy, twice as complex had fewer ports and was much more expensive than the identically performing but non-honking Mk V. It was a great regulator and it was a bold and innovative move by Scubapro to produce it in the first place. But the market forces required to keep the high cost regulator in production just did not exist over the long term.

 

[Web Monkey]

It's an automatic safeguard to keep the ranks of divers limited to those with the sense to check their SPG from time to time.

My LDS has a special fail-safe method of preventing OOA divers

If you bring a tank back empty, you have to pay for VIP and hear about it for the rest of your life.

Terry

 

[Al Mialkovsky]

Both my smart com and cobra are air integrated and they scream when you get low.

Rick I'll sell your brother-in-law my honkers if he requires them

 

[Gary D.]

Another viable thread met with holier-than-thou negativity.

Not my point.

If all the so-called improvements to make diving easier and safer were developed and used a person would be bigger and heavier than a Newt Suit.

The person that forgets to check their gauges is most likely the same person that runs low or out of gas in a car. They are most likely the same person that that doesn’t change oil or check their tire pressure.

Now if someone doesn’t have the presence of mind to keep an eye on small details like watching the gas gauge, or in this case an air gauge, they don’t need to be diving until they can learn that very simple skill. Actually it is one of the simplest skills.

Adding electronic components, which don’t like moisture to begin with, or a mechanical device into the system is not the answer. One is just adding off the shelf or over the counter artificial intelligence for you to bet your life on. That kind of gamble can be drastically reduced, by using a simple god given skill. Adding tasks is not the way to go and those devices will add a task be it in or out of the water.

Those devices that did warn divers in the past have gone away for a reason.

Gary D.