Automatic shoulder valve or cuff dump?

[Paul Burgess]

For those of you who have an autodump and use the suit for buoyancy, how do you use the autodump? Do you close it a few clicks when you get to the bottom? How do you know how many clicks? What about when you ascend?

The reason I ask is that I always keep my valve fully open and just take off squeeze, using the BC for buoyancy. I have never had the suit for buoyancy method explained to me.

Cheers,

Paul

[Richard Mason]

Originally Posted by Paul Burgess

For those of you who have an autodump and use the suit for buoyancy, how do you use the autodump? Do you close it a few clicks when you get to the bottom? How do you know how many clicks? What about when you ascend?

The reason I ask is that I always keep my valve fully open and just take off squeeze, using the BC for buoyancy. I have never had the suit for buoyancy method explained to me.

Cheers,

Paul

Only tried it once, with a suit I was trying out. This is how I did it:

1. Drop down to the bottom.
2. Close the valve down (ie screw it shut).
3. Slowly put air into the suit until you are perfectly neutral.
4. Pushing your dump valve shoulder uppermost, unscrew the valve until it just starts to bubble then screw back down again but only by a beesdick.

This worked for me. Thereafter, If I ascended a little, the expanding air vented off, so buoyancy remained reasonably constant.

Overall though, after my first proper play with it yesterday, I think I prefer NigelH's method; no problems with air migration to worry about.