Dive Planning: Air & Gas management for beginner scuba divers.

Every diver should have dive plan. Part of that plan should be how you plan to utilize your gas, and also plan for additional contingencies for that same cylinder of gas. Lyell walks you through the process new divers can use to plan out how best to use and plan out their gas usage for any scuba dive!

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[jmpublicvideos]

Love the Superman photo/art on the wall!
Where did you get it???

[Chogogo]

Even though I’m still working towards AOW I really enjoy the analytics of how I personally use my own air and my wife as well, so I track our SAC, RMV, average depth, & max depth on an spreadsheet. It’s helping me find out average consumption, and be able to calculate with rough scuba math if we are going to have to turn a dive earlier due to more current than planned, and if I need to go shallower to surface with sufficient reserve. It’s over the top for the type of diving I’m doing now which is mostly reef dives in Bonaire, but I think it makes me a more aware diver, and will give me a better starting point for tec at some point. Thanks so much for the t-shirt by the way. 👍🏻

[DarR]

The "Turn-Around PSI alarm I set on my computer varies depending on depth and/or distance.
For a shallow dive (<40 ft) I'd set the "Turn-Around" alarm at 1700. A deeper dive would necessitate a higher PSI Turn-Around" alarm which could be over 2000.

[ivoryjohnson]

I do the rule of thirds easier to keep count but use something it’s a bad day to run out of gas at depth

[johnwilliamsscuba]

I'm running out of air nitrox whatever a constant danger it can happen to anybody. Keep a constant watch on your tank pressure gauge.

[leopoldbloom]

Actually, the most common tank in Europe is 12 liter which accounts to 2400 liter air at 200 bar. The recommended reserve is 50 bar, so you have a slightly bigger tank and a reserve of almost 50% more than at 500 psi.

[bloodymarvelous]

The reserve pressure is rounded to an easy to remember number. In the US it's 500 psi, in the rest of the world it's 50 bar. It's not exactly the same value after conversion. The same way in the US the first car service is often at 1000 miles, and in the rest of the world it's at 2000 km (instead of 1600 km, which would be the same after conversion).

Also, in the rest of the world, cylinder sizes are measured in physical dimensions, not in maximum capacity. So an Al-80 isn't a 2200 liter, but an 11 liter cylinder. This means it's not immediately obvious when you're comparing cylinders of different sizes and maximum pressures to determine which one will hold the most gas. However, since metric calculations are so much easier to perform than imperial, the maximum capacity can be easily determined by some simple mental arithmetic.

Also, you're almost always dealing with cylinders containing less than maximum fill capacity, and denoting a cylinder as 80 cuft would be considered misleading if there's only 68 cuft of air in there. The physical size of 11 liters is true no matter how much pressurized air it contains.

The rule of thirds is mostly applicable to diving in overhead environments, because you need enough gas to make it out safely if your buddy runs out of air at the deepest point of penetration. For regular open water diving, very few technical divers will apply the rule of thirds.

I recently learned that on penetration dives with DPV's, a rule of fourths is applied when you have a backup DPV, and a rule of sixths if you don't. This is because you cover distance far more quickly with a DPV than you can on your own power. If your DPV fails, you will need to have enough reserve gas to be able to swim back to safety.