Never really thought about it like that. Crazy

woo hooo!!!

I did! Hope you did too!

Patrick is really good at explaining stuff!

@@Navy1977 several times throughout. I was with the guy in the yellow hat talking to the xdeep representative.

My understanding is that most of the changes came about from the need to get the unit through CE testing so the unit can be sold in Europe. They impose extreme "worst case" circumstances during testing (for the amount of CO2 that needs to be scrubbed and the temperature, for example) and then make measurements from there. Under the typical operating conditions that most people use the SW1 for, it performs perfectly well. However, it would struggle in the CE testing. So the answer is that for 99% of us diving the SW1, we really don't need a SW2, unless you happen to like some of the features that were added. But going forward, the SW2 is a good evolution of the unit. Just as you probably won't sell your car just to get the newer version, unless the new car has something you really want.

Reduced work-of-breathing and better sorb utilization efficiency is helpful for going deeper. Right now the meg is the go-to for expeditions with those requirements, but it's quite bulky by comparison. Imagine a cave like Roaring River Spring where there's a restriction then it opens up and is borehole down to at least 500ft/150m with no end in sight.

The 80 cu ft is BOTH for diluent and bailout. This is a configuration for the rebreather for more recreational use (open water, relatively shallow), where you don't need two 80 cu ft tanks. The O2 bottle still goes across your butt like the sidemount configuration.

I personally LOVE the idea of using the sidewinder like this. In something like a more traditional back-mount rebreather (say, Revo, AP, Meg, etc.) you have a small bottle of dill on your back, but it's not large enough for bailout. So you carry a "sling bottle" of bailout. This bottle is hanging off of you on one side or the other, makes you out of balance, gets in the way of a camera, etc. With this configuration of the sidewinder, it moves that big bottle to your back, symmetrical, out of the way. The only downside is that your bailout and your dill have to be the same mix. But for 99% of recreational rebreather diving, that's fine and normal.

@@BlueWorldplus I like this myself for recreational mode. Thanks for knocking my head out of the muck with the O2 question. 😊

As a strong believer of the "complacency kills" theory, I'm not a fan of eCCR so I couldn't care less about that, but the rec/tech versatility is truly a game changer. No more awkward sidemount for boat dives on a mixed diving trip. Imagine a week in florida for caves w/ a couple lionfish control boat dives thrown in, or a trip south of the border for some charming cenotes with a couple boat dives throw in to experience the reefs. That said, I've never been a fan of lack of diluent redundancy on the KISS, but it's easy enough to strap a 3L bottle alongside the O2 and plumb it into the MAV/ADV, then have a QC6 whip on a Shrimp BOV which also permits adding gas to the loop. 3L dil also takes over wing inflation and drysuit gets a dedicated air/argon bottle. Provides redundant buoyancy control and redundant dil. The only single point of failure at that point is the O2, which _could_ be remedied by having a second O2 bottle w/ compensated first stage plumbed into a pure MAV (no CMF) which also eliminates the uncompensated O2 first stage depth limitation, but that's a point I think very few need to worry about including myself. Personally I'm fine with going SCR with dil-only in the _hopefully unlikely_ event of an O2 system failure or bailing out to OC.

You can dunk the whole thing in water to clean it.

I believe the scrubber canisters themselves are identical, but as left and right you would probably have then rigged differently. Not sure why you would want to rotate them. What many people do is only change out the exhale side after a short dive and leave the largely unused inhale side packed.

@@BlueWorldplus 2*1.5 hour dives seems like a situation where rotating cannisters would make sense to optimize scrubber use. In the backmount configuration it doesn't look like there is much rigging involved. I'd be curious to see the unit setup for sidemount.

The counterlung and the breathing loop/mouthpiece are the same. But there will be a good used market for the sidewinder 1 for a while. It's a very good rebreather.

June/July 2024 timeframe.

I would expect very short indeed, because functionally, it's almost the same. There are a few small things you would do differently (such as draining water) but most of the differences are in construction, not use.

At least one North Florida cave diver/instructor has tested the prototype and either already has or soon will have the first release candidate.

In theory yes.

I don't think so but not totally sure.

Why not? Now he has time to play around making up new stuff 😂

Mike likes inventing stuff more than mass production. It was a fairly solid business decision to sell the company to a larger organization that could do mass production at a lower cost in higher volume. Now Mike has more time to dive, explore and invent, which is what he loves to do.

99.9% of the time, diving accidents--including rebreather accidents--end up being diver error, not equipment failure.

I didn't like the screw on head. @@BlueWorldplus