Quote: (Originally Posted by schford)
Rod - have you thought about a Sports Kiss?
Stuart
Rod,
First of all. Have you seen any/all of the SCR/CCR units that are available?
If not then you may well want to look around at in alphabetical order:-
1) Dolphin SCR
2) Sport KISS MCCR
3) Submatix SCR
If you are not going to go deeper than 40m and know the dive depth in advance(the unit and the gas you use is set for the target depth) then a second hand dolphin is probably the cheapest way to do it. I'd recomend adding PPO2 monitoring to one, but it's easy to do.
A Submatix would do exactly the same for you.
A Sport KISS is in the same ball park pricewise as the Submatix , but requires more training and more consumables (a new set of sensors each year at approx £180 for the set) and also requires that you monitor the unit and react to what it's telling you during the dive. However once you have a KISS rigged it doesn't matter if it's a 45m or 4.5m dive. you don't set the unit up any differently.
However if the locations you dive in cant supply O2 but can supply Nitrox 40 easily then a SCR may be the way.
The other option you may want to consider is to transition to using a twinset, the outlay is much less and you can configure it so when you get to your destination you just cam-band two single cylinders onto your wing, put your regs on and dive. As has been mentioned rebreathers take effort and regular diving to stay current on, where as open circuit either gives you gas or it doesn't.
Hopefully this has given you a few things to think about.
HTH
Simon A