RonMicjan

Flying a rig manually helps keep the diver focused on the workings of the rig, watching po2, seeing the sensors respond during injection, etc. When the diver gets busy for a few minutes, the solenoid firing is a poke in the ribs to wake up and get focused again.

If you never run manual, its much easier to get complacent and let the unit run itself, so the diver is in la-la land, trusting the unit and when it quits, there is one extra layer of attention that is missing, IE: manual operation. This also prepares the diver for the time when the primary fails and solenoid operation quits, if you run manually a lot, then having the solenoid fail is no longer an OMG, its a minor inconvienence.

I generally hear my solenoid fire about 3-5 times during a dive, which means I neglected it for maybe 3 minutes at most, it takes a bit longer than that to get me hypoxic, unlike a K-CCR (kiss style) which can go a whole dive w/o becoming hypoxic due to the constant bleed. (if set up perfect) I thought about taking along a small o2 cylinder plumbed to the loop with an orfice, to have the best of both worlds. Would save batteries too.

Having cut my teeth on K-CCR (why not adopt K-CCR as the official term for leaky valve CC rebreathers?) I am used to keeping good track of displays, its the folks who just strap on the rig and swim merrily away who are going to get in trouble more often than the ones with a healthly dose of paranoia. Im guessing that these would be the folks who tend to neglect proper maintainence also.

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