Red-Sea sofnolime cost

[Padowan]

To anyone who's taken their RB to the Red Sea....

What sort of price have you had to pay for Sofnolime in the Red Sea? I've just been quoted £20 a fill which seems a tad more expensive than I expected. I'm sure there is additional cost to the UK due to importing the stuff, but it's about 300% what I would expect to pay in the UK....

In warm water what sort of runtimes do you do on a scrubber fill? Do you religiously stick to the 3 hrs, or do you push it to perhaps 4 as the exertion levels are probably less than in colder water?

Also has anyone tried using O2 consumption as a guide to remaining srcrubber life? If you produce say, 1lt CO2 for each 1lt O2 you consume, you can calculate how many litres of CO2 the scrubber has done, and then work this back - the 180mins is based on a 1.6lt/min CO2 production = 288lt CO2 "capacity" in the scrubber, which would equate to about 96 bar of O2 consumption? You could apply the <50m after 120mins and <20m after 140mins rules to the same equations and translate this into a <50m after xx bar O2 used type value. Any mask clearing or vented gas, would only go to making this figure more conservative, surely.

At the end of the day my life is worth £20 a fill, so I'll go with it, but just thinking out loud....

Any experience of this, or other info, anyone?

[Simon TW]

Where are you going and who do you intend to dive with?

[Padowan]

Flying to Sharm, and on the Liveaboard Excel.

[Simon TW]

Sorry I can't help more as it's not my neck of the woods, however as there are plenty of dive schools in Sharm try sending an email to those who are listed as tech. as most of these provide training on ccr or scr so they either have a good stock or a good source.

Hope that i'e been a little help.

[Adrian Kelland]

Padowan

When I was last on a liveaboard, some of the guys there were doing their Inspiration training. They had all brought their sofnalime with them. A 25l(?size) keg each. They had made a deal with one of the schools in Sharm who would supply the O2 (delivered to the boat) for free IIRC, in return for any unused sofnalime. At the time, the stuff was twice? as expensive to get there than here. I am not sure of the school, but it did the full TDI range and had a fountain in the middle of the courtyard. Might ring bells for any one else here. Another route to the school; they were doing their training with Andy from the St Albans branch of Mike's.

HTH

Adrian

[Pierre Farrugia]

Brass, this is a replay I got from an other forum:

"Down here in Oz we regularly dive the scrubber for 5 to 6 hours and have done do for years. One rule though is that if you are taking on a deep dive (50m+) then change the scrubber if it has more tha 2 to 2 1/2 hours on it."

Obviously there is no hard evidence apart from hands on diving! So treat as such.

Regards

Pierre

[Padowan]

Thanks for the info everyone - I'll have a mooch about on the web for some shops and see what info I can get from them. I still have a month or so to organise this, so there should be enough time to get something sorted.

[ChrisP]

FIVE weeks today
C