New Jersey Scuba Diving

The "Regulator Tax" and the Buddy System

You should probably just skip this section

The scuba industry has successfully convinced the diving public that annual servicing of regulators is essential for your safety. Actually, at $50-$100 per regulator per year, annual servicing of regulators is far more essential to their bottom line than it is to your safety. Am I so cheap that I would risk my life to save less than $100? Not really.

All this is mixed up in business, economics, liability, and the fallacious buddy system. As you know, in the buddy system your buddy is theoretically your backup emergency air supply underwater, insuring not only against out-of-air situations, but also against equipment failures, and therefore you need only one tank and regulator. In keeping with this theory, you are sold a wholly inadequate breathing system with no built-in redundancy at all. Then, to try to reduce the inherent danger of diving with such a system, or perhaps just the legal liability in promoting it, you are then "required" to have it "serviced" at least once a year, whether it needs it or not. In fact, this is the icing on the cake for the industry, since such servicing is far more profitable than sales! The real purpose of all this is to lower the entry cost of diving by several hundred dollars, expand the customer base as rapidly as possible, and maximize revenues, and all this is done at the expense of true safety. In an industry that professes to be obsessed with safety at all costs, this hypocrisy is almost beyond belief. ( I'm not saying your local dive shop is evil, but he'll go right along with the industry-standard because everyone else does, and he needs to make a living. )

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