Are Rebreathers THAT Dangerous?!

if you're among the first batches of divers back in the 60s and 70s or if you watch old school scuba diving shows like Sea Hunt then you'll know that there used to be kind of an animosity between two different types of divers so the hardhat scuba divers and the open circuit divers today hardhat divers are pretty much limited to commercial divers but there are still two different types of recreational diver out there open circuit and closed circuit so that and the hippie-dippie free divers but we don't talk about them so that we don't inflate their egos as we all know so scuba was invented by Jacques Cousteau and Emil Gagnon in 1943 and that really changed the world as we know it and it actually allowed people to breathe underwater but what most of us don't really know is that rebreather is actually predate open-circuit scuba so a patent application was made in 1878 for a rebreathing device known as the loose rebreather invented by Henry a flus and siebe gorman that basically recirculated oxygen and was used for the very first time here in England so a few tweaks and changes over the years but recreational rebreathers closed-circuit especially weren't that popular until the 1990s now we're looking into rebreather failure points really so most of this is going to be expected li- against rebreathers but remember that they are basically thousands of rebreather divers out there and many of these faults and potential dangers weren't fatal thanks to very good training practice and of course a great mindset on the divers part so hi I'm mark from simply scuba and I'll rebreathers that dangerous modern rebreathers have integrated electronics that compile all of your dive data and alert you to developing problems that is when all components are working fine so the digital side of rebreathers is often viewed as the most flawed aspects that actually causes accidents as with any piece of technology they sometimes freeze or just hang so you can glance at your screen and your PPO to is at a sensible level but if you're not really paying attention it could be stuck on the reading from a minute go so there are reports of rebreathers resetting themselves during a dive actually part of the setup procedure and checks is for it to do an o2 cell check where the unit actually flushes pure oxygen over the sensors and as a bad thing outside of the water it's okay but at death it can lead to an o2 hits now I trust my phone and my PC to kind of do their job when I want them to but they don't control my breathing supplies so if they screw up it's just an inconvenience if your rebreather does it bad time free breathers will usually be fitted with a oxygen sensor and maybe even a co2 sensor if you're a little bit swish so these are disposable chemical sensors that have a shelf life and need to be calibrated properly before a dive so somebody was working on a solid-state o to sell I think I've read a little while back so that would be a nice alternative but for now we do need to keep them locked away in an airtight container so they don't go off too fast is a bit like using a slice of bread to check your air quality but don't do that obviously don't there are many failure points on a rebreather with multiple joints and sealing o-rings that all need to be checked and maintained properly if an o-ring fails on your loop then your problem can range anywhere from a small little trickle of water that can get caught in a counter long and just dumped out to a complete flood and a caustic mouthwash so a 2013 analysis of rebreather fatalities between 1998 and 2010 found that rebreathers have a 25 fold increased risk of component failure compared to a standard twin set configuration so standard open circuit setups are fairly bulletproof because they're simply much more time and research put into them the lower demand for rebreathers mean that some are fairly basic in comparison okay so never get lazy with a rebreather and don't try to cut corners or use cheap alternatives so not packing your scrubber properly can lead to gas tracking freely through it so that your co2 levels secretly creep up and if you don't have a co2 sensor then the next thing to actually warn you is just gonna be a headache so rushing into the water is just begging for a problem and one of the biggest errors or user errors I should say is pushing your limits too fast going straight down to deeper depths or complicated dives is dangerous sure you have the equipment to go there but you don't yet have the experience in recognizing problems as they develop or knowing that you are just out of your debt when rebreather manufacturers design their rebreather they know what they're doing and what not to do as well so they can emit some basic programming restrictions that are so obviously stupid but someone not paying attention or who doesn't know what they're doing can you know calibrate their o2 sensor so it thinks it's 98% when it's actually 36 or something like that so bad things can happen as I said earlier most of the big manufacturers have teams of smart boys and girls designing building and testing open circuit but that's only because most scuba divers use them if the popularity of rebreathers and open circuit switched then more time would be spent fool proofing rebreathers and making them more robust I mean I once knew a guy who would use a popsicle stick wedged into a part of his rebreather because it was the perfect space needed to prevent something from leaking and yeah there was these two bits and one just kind of just twist is enough that it would be like leak at the top so now I know if you jam by one of those wooden popsicle sticks in it just so yeah I guess rebreathers can be dangerous but you can say that about anything really I mean we really have just poked right at the very delicate part of rebreathers and if incidents were much more common than they actually are right now then divers just wouldn't use them would they I mean dudes sort of rebreathers have a place in the diving community yes I think they do but they should really be reserved for the experienced divers because when something when open-circuit goes wrong it's really noisy and obvious that anybody could diagnose what's going wrong but rebreathers are quiet when they go wrong and you really need to be switched on to a fault before or even during to actually recognize what's happening but hey we have just beaten rebreathers to the ground let's discuss their good points as well and of course rebreathers in general in the comments I mean what do you think about them would you ever use one granted probably not just after watching this video but I've used a few of my times and they work they do the job I did have a problem with one of them on one or two of my dives but that's what your bailout is for hey thanks for watching and of course I'm safe diving cherry-picked the weirdest questions that we came across and even though they're probably you know what answers if you actually click on those questions on Google I'm actually going to answer them here now because Google has been wrong before and believe and believe but there are not or there are some plenty of missed truths

Channel: Simply Scuba

Views: 28,794

Rating: 4.7472529 out of 5

Keywords: simplyscuba, simply scuba, Simply, Scuba, #simplyscuba, scuba diving, #scubadiving, the simply group, Friday Feature, Friday, Feature, 11.10.2019, Are, Rebreathers, THAT, Dangerous, Are Rebreathers THAT Dangerous?!, are rebreathers dangerous, can rebreathers be dangerous, what is a rebreather?, Mark Newman, scuba diving (interest), scuba diving - topic

Id: 4VxQFA3_KT4

Length: 7min 21sec (441 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 11 2019