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How much weight and how to set up a weight belt

In General

  •  A thick wetsuit while diving in colder conditions will increase your buoyancy, thus requiring more weight.

  • The same goes for your pair of gloves. It may seem trivial, but it adds extra buoyancy.

  • Hoods to cover your head while diving. They’re thick. They consist of a lot of material. And they make you float more!

  • Booties, factor in the extra neoprene they’re made of.

  • the thicker the material, the more positively buoyant you’ll be. 

  • Most dive shops use Aluminum 80 tanks for their recreational dives. Calculate as normal.

  • However, if you’re using a steel tank, you can subtract some weight. About 6 – 10 lbs in our estimation.

 

it’s a rule of thumb, but each additional mm of thickness equates to an extra 1 – 3 pounds of weight needed. In general : 5% of your body weight + 1 – 3 lbs per mm of thickness.

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How to conduct a weight check

  • at the beginning : Gear up with every piece of equipment you’ll be diving with and enter water that’s too deep to stand in. Take a deep breathe in and hold it. Position your body vertically in the water and completely deflate your BCD. Correctly weighted divers should sink slightly to eye level but not much further. If you’re sinking more than that while holding your breathe, you’re overweighted. If you’re unable to sink at all and your head remains above the surface, you’re underweighted.

  • however, at the end of your dive, air are consumed with an equivalent weight of around 2-2.5kg, you need to add in this factor for the above weight test. Better test with a reserve tank (i.e. with residual air remains, around 500psi/35bar) to count in this factor.

  • at the end of your dive (3 minutes at 15 feet depth): see if you remain neutrally buoyant with no air in your BCD. Take a deep breath in, you should rise just a touch. Now exhale, you should sink just a bit. Breathe normal and you should remain in the same spot at 15 feet.

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General in short

Threading tricks

Detail explanations

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