Hookah 12Vdc direct drive air-line diving system

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This sounds exactly what I need for cleaning and maintaining the bottom (as well as having a bit of fun). Does anyone have any experience of this particular product or such products in general? What should I look out for, look into? Obviously all the diving issues are similar or identical to SCUBA so I am not looking for input on diving per se, but this particular type of product.

Hookah 12V air-line diving system

Many thanks.
 
Hi David,
As you'll well know, I'm no expert on anything, but I've looked into this a bit ... not this product, but the means of breathing underwater for short periods of time at shallow depths for cleaning/maintenance etc.
I've almost persuaded myself that the airline approach is not for me, and that a small air bottle is better. However I concede that getting it filled is an issue. On the other side of the coin is the inconvenience of trailing a hose and possibly getting it wrapped around something; the serious draw on the battery; the cost (Approx £500 before shipping and tax).
Like you, I'd be very interested to hear from others with personal experience.
 
I looked at this and found a site that gives DIY instructions to make a hookah kit using an oiless compressor (diaphram type). Piston types allow small amounts of oil into the air past the piston.

The unit also insisted on a tank to allow for extra air usage during hard work.

12VDC I dont think would have enough power for long dives.

I do normal SCUBA and have a 200 BAR compressor driven by either a 3KVA single phase motor or 5hp honda engine when diving off the beach.

In all cases the air intake and outlet filters are very important to keep air clean and any contaminates will be very dangerous at depth.

One other way is to use a SCUBA tank on deck with long hose for say boat cleaning.

A quick Google gave me this on E bay. Have a look at the power requirements.
 
The units problem is the volume of air it can supply even at a moderate depth.
So anything that puts your breathing rate up:
Moderate work
Cold water
Apprehension
Will put the unit under strain. (See note below)
Also I wouldn't trust the battery supply unless it is being float charged when in use, which then brings in the problem of possible exhaust contamination.

Note - from the website
[ QUOTE ]
Under hard exertion, at even shallow depths, it is possible to "breathe down" the compressor (consume air at a rate higher than the compressor can generate). The situation can be eased or prevented by slowing down (or even stopping) the activity and allowing the compressor to regenerate air into the hose, rest until breathing is normal, and then establish a pace at which there is no hesitation on the inhalation effort.


[/ QUOTE ]
I would stick to a smaller capacity diving cylinder.
 
Bloke next door starts his main engine or lights the BBQ, were are the fumes going whilst your busy making swirly patterns in your antifoul. Surely you have a dive shop nearby so clean filtered air will be available. Second hand dive kit will be much cheaper. You will need some training with either set up, must be another ex pat nearby who can dive and show you in exchange for sorting out there electrics

I scrub my boat using my diving kit, do not under estimate how hard work underwater is.

Pete
 
Hi David I have just joined the forum on liveaboards as my wife and i live aboard our colvic watson 32 i am a retired boat builder and spent time in the services as a specialist diver! you should NEVER rely on a surface command air supply unless it is a professionaly built unit and maintained by professionals also you should have a professional on deck to watch over the equipment. By far the best type of equipment is a standard bottle with demand valve and pressure gauge this keeps you mobile and safe from getting caught on protrusions as one of the replys has stated. Even with this equipment you should be tethered to the boat on a running line of at least 14mm and have a person on deck who is conversant with signals you have both agreed on.People often say that i stick too much to saftey but i have made over 1200dives in all the oceans in the world and am still alive to tell you this. Speaks for its self hope this is helpful to you best wishes
Pete <span style="color:blue"> </span>
 
Thanks, very useful post and I followed up with a fair bit of research. And thanks also to the other two posters after you. I did train for scuba in Malta in the 1970s and as an engineer I certainly remember all the relevant medical/physics and am a strong swimmer so 'training' isn't an issue for me for scrubbing the bottom, checking the anchor, etc.

I simply don't have enough room for cylinders and it normally is very difficult to get a recharge. I would probably use a couple of cylinders to change the anodes given that a diver friend of mine used the best part of a cylinder to do that a while back and he is a frequent diver so will use less air. Scrubbing the bottom is going to take even more. Then there are some dive shops that require a PADI certificate for a refill and I am not going to take a PADI course. In any case I have no interest in diving other than for working on the boat so scuba would be heavy and inconvenient - and be more expensive than a hookah.

I have found a compressor that seems to meet your suggested spec, what do you think?..... Draper Compressor I thought maybe I would fit a 40 micron particulate filter to the output? What I then need is a hose and suitable regulator/demand valve/mouthpiece. I've been searching the manufacturers and none I have found yet will work down at lower pressures - they are all looking for around 140 psi and at full load I think that the Draper will be well below 100psi? One article suggested that there are special regulators available for hookahs. Do you know who makes them, can you recommend one? Plus a suitable harness to keep the hose out of the way. I have a conventional weight belt which will be fine. From the reading I have done, an air receiver may not be needed if the hose is 60 feet or so. I can always retro-fit one if needed. I am hoping that I might manage to buy a regulator with hose and harness as a kit from a mainstream dive supplier rather than the small outfit in the link I posted at the beginning - they have not replied to me which is a bad sign.

By the way, as for clean air, I would expect to use this either in a (clean) marina from shore power or at anchor running our generator. The generator exhaust discharges on the port side and since the boat normally lies to the wind, it will not be difficult to arrange for the air inlet to be safe. Exhausts from other boats are highly unlikely to be an issue and if they become so I can simply postpone the bottom scrubbing.
 
Hi Pete, welcome to the forum /forums/images/graemlins/smile.gif and thanks for your input. At present I can free-dive down with a brush and scrub for twenty seconds or so at a time, then I come back up again. It is tiring, slow and of dubious safety from a health point of view (constantly holding my breath). There are no significant protrusions on the bottom of my boat and provided I could jettison the weight belt and regulator I would bob back up to the surface just as if I had been free-diving. I cannot see why a hookah should pose any additional risk? If the argument is that the compressor can stop then so what? I come up. It's considerably less than two metres, about my own height!
 
Tubi-grip

I've got to admit having done some (very) emergency barnacle (lots, horrible) cleaning from my prop using a flexible plastic tube gripped between my teeth and the other end held by my lovely assistant in the dinghy. It was nasty, scraped my knees and knuckles trying to stay down and get the job done, but I did get it done. I suppose this was very dodgy, was it?
 
Re: Tubi-grip

Hi Lemain, why not get a set of legs and do it on the beach in comfort, generally going to make abetter job of things to rather than floting around underwater? If you need an emergency set up what about using the old style stab jacket with a pony bottle, should be enough to clear a rope etc. By the way thanks for the info a while back on radios I got a Furuno 1550 but yet to set it up (waiting till after I do the LRC course)
 
Many thanks for your kind concern but if that wiki article is your knowledge base you need to know a bit more about hookah sets before being in a position to comment. It could be that others are following this thread and have not come across hookah sets so I will elaborate a little. Interestingly, they are quite common outside the UK where, it seems, the BSAC start to foam at the mouth and hiss uncontrollably at the very mention of the word. It is true that since a hookah set could carry on giving out air all day long some people might be tempted to dive for long periods and it is true that some people are not aware that nitrogen can dissolve in the blood at very shallow depths (there is no minimum depth at which you are guaranteed to be free from the risk of getting the bends). For a yachtsman who wants to do some work under his boat to a depth of a couple of metres a hookah is ideal provided he follows the correct guidelines for maximum length of dive and is aware that he is not immune to problems at a couple of metres.

1. Cylinders take more space to carry,
2. Cylinders are much more expensive to get kitted-up for,
3. Cylinders need to be re-charged (NOT easy in many places)
4. Cylinder air goes stale anyway so you can't store it indefinitely
5. Cylinders are far more dangerous to store (thousands of psi makes a cylinder a potential bomb)
6. Cylinders are much heavier to wear and more difficult to use under a yacht
7. Cylinders offer comparatively very short dive times (unless you are more experienced than the average hobby diver you are not going to be able to carry on board more than a couple of hours of air in two large cylinders /forums/images/graemlins/frown.gif)
8. If you wanted to carry a compressor to re-charge SCUBA cylinders then you are talking about different technology and skills required to do so safely as the compressor you need to fill bottles run at 3000psi vs a workshop type which runs at 120psi, which is all that is needed for a hookah set at shallow depths.

Very few yachtsmen would want to carry cylinders and a compressor whereas a hookah set could be a boon to working on the underside of the boat and could be a genuine safety aid when removing a rope from the prop or inspecting other concerns below the waterline.

Back onto compressors and your wiki link........There are two types of air compressors in this range of pressures, oil-free and oiled. As you will see from earlier in the thread, we are talking about an oil-free compressor (which are very common today as they avoid the need for costly filters). Prudence suggests a particulate filter though quite a few commercially available hookah kits do not include a filter. You also need to remember, as discussed earlier in this thread, that the type of diving compressor used to fill bottles is an entirely different thing to a diving compressor for hookah sets.

SCUBA sets (i.e. with bottles) have a stage one regulator to reduce the bottle pressure to, typically, 140psi. 140psi is presented to the second stage regulator/demand valve. In a hookah set, the pressures are customarily (though not necessarily) rather lower and they are usually based on workshop type compressors running at about 116 psi. So, for a hookah compressor we are looking at either a conventional (with oil) workshop compressor plus appropriate filters to remove oil (and moisture) or an oil-free compressor with some kind of particulate filter which might be no more than a sintered in-line filter. The oil-free compressors generally have PTFE seals which is how they manage to work without oil. Again, everyday technology used in workshops. Not rocket science, perhaps, but who needs rocket science - there is no magic or voodoo in any of this. Why do you call it a "lash-up"?
 
[ QUOTE ]
Hi Lemain, why not get a set of legs and do it on the beach in comfort, generally going to make abetter job of things to rather than floting around underwater?

[/ QUOTE ]You're thinking from a UK perspective but I am in the Med. We don't have a (significant) tide here in the Med so legs are useless. There are no scrubbing posts for the same reason. Haul-outs are a big problem here with many marinas insisting on carrying out all work on the boat. Here in Almerimar you are not permitted to even clean the waterline when the boat is on the hard. For this reason the total cost is high so almost nobody hauls every year but you do need to be able to scrub, inspect and change the anodes if necessary. To date I have had to employ a diver - and that gets expensive. I need and want to do the diving myself so I have to make a choice - cylinders or hookah. You mention using a pony cylinder - I don't think that would help very much. I looked into that some time ago but when I thought through all the problems of getting it charged for a few minutes of dive-time it did not make any sense at all. To work under the yacht you need time - i.e. plenty of air at shallow depths.
 
Hi Lemain

I was about to reply in the same vain.

I think that draper compressor would be ok with as you say some particlel filters.

One other point about cylinders is that they must be pressure tested every year and generally only have a safe life of 5 years but this mat be more the dive shops wishing to sell new cylinders.

One other point is the 140 psi for SCUBA allows for diving to 30 meters of more where the wate is at about 3 atms. With Hookah I would limit my depth to about 5 meters for reasons of nitrogen buildup and the ease of surfacing if a problem occurs.

I would also limit the length of hose to reduce possable entanglements is there is no one on the surface to manage the amount of hose deployed.

The oil free compressor I have is an out low pressure paint spraying compressor that I have serviced to use and was so designed to prevent any oil getting into the paint which would danage the painted surface.

Owning and maintaining a SCUBA dive compressor I agree it is a very different piece of equipment and the only reason I have one is my proposed dive ares is very far from normal dive locations and thus cylinder fills would be very difficult.
 
Hi Geoff - Many thanks for the offer. We have more or less decided to leave here in May towards Greece via the Rivieras so will be passing you at some stage - do stay in touch. Which hookah set did you buy, where from and what did you pay? The set that I originally posted (with the 12V supply) seemed (from the supplier's own account) underpowered - is that your experience?

I would prefer a 12V set provided it is powerful enough. It also means that I could buy a battery and run it from the tender for short periods if ever I wanted to.
 
Hi Rogershaw, Thanks for that. I have been doing some more research and it seems that a variable pressure regulator is important in hookah systems. One of the world leaders is a company called Brownie's Brownie's who specialise in hookah kit and parts. Among their parts is a product that they call a 'Pressurised Snorkel" which runs from 12Vdc and works down to 6 to 10 feet. This sounds rather like the product that I started this thread with, but with honest claims and an appropriate regulator. I rather think that this is all I need and at $600 is quite good value for me. Brownie's Pressurised Snorkel from their distributor, scuba.com
What do you think?
 
[ QUOTE ]
Many thanks for your kind concern but if that wiki article is your knowledge base you need to know a bit more about hookah sets before being in a position to comment.

[/ QUOTE ] David my post was quite genuine, I value your posts on these forums so I don't want to see you come to a sticky end. I have ben diving for 22 years so feel I am reasonably competent to comment, otherwise I shouldn't be teaching it. The reason I posted that link was to highlight some of the problems to those as you say who may not be aware of the dangers..

Assuming you are only using it for maintenance of your hull (say 3 metres) then the amount of nitrogen you will absorb isn't an issue.
You say that clyinders take up space but then so does a compressor. A second hand cylinder, regulator and jacket will be no more expensive than a hooka set. Yes cylinders need to be re-charged. The last time I was asked for my log book was 10 years ago and only then because we were buying a helium mix. Dive shops will however want to be certain that the cylinder has been tested and in date before they fill. Not sure what the Spanish regulations are but in the UK it's 2.5 years for steel cylinders, not 1 year as quoted above, (Ali cylinders are slightly different as there is a problem with cracking in olders ones requiring NDT to test them). The med is surrounded by dive shops and they want your business, also remember there are other uses for diving clyinders including filling air rifles.
Air inside cylinders doesn't "go stale".
You say clyinders are far more dangerous to store, thats a personal opinon for the owner to decide, just like having gas or outboard petrol on board. Kept in test they are very safe.
Yes they are heavy, but you might need that weight to get down, certainly if you are wearing a wetsuit in the med during winter. The dive time for a normal 12L clyinder should go like this. I would estimate your breathing rate between 25-30 litres per minute. Ignore the depth eliment your only just under the surface. A 12 L clyinder at 232 bar has 2800 L of air. Ignoring the normal 50 bar reserve (because your just swimming around your yacht in a harbour) you could use this down to 30 bar ( the regulator will need a minimum of 10 bar to work properly) so you have 2400 litres available to dive with. Thats 80 mins from one fill (@ £3 in UK prices) You will be cold by then and have a spotless hull.
Aren't small oil free compressor used for paint spraying? The reason a diving compressor has both water traps and carbon filters is they need them. However if you are set on going down this route would you first please ask the compressor manufacturer if its suitable for the supply of breathing air. Me? I am about to buy another small clyinder to keep on my yacht on the KISS principle. The kit is bomb proof, reliable and easy to use. Do let us know how you get on.

Pete
 
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