Regulator Service

To Service or Not to Service Why and when you should maintain and service your gear. A lot of people come in and ask, "I only dove a couple of times last year. Do I need to still service my regs?" or "What happens if I don't rinse my gear after diving?" This article will discuss the basic functionality of regulators, the importance of maintaining your them and why they need to be serviced according to the manufacturer. First and foremost, we will discuss how a regulator works. Regulators break down the high pressure of air in the cylinder to a much lower pressure for divers to be able to breathe. The first stage reduces the high pressure to an intermediate pressure and the second stage breaks the pressure down even further to ambient pressure. This brings us to the question, "Why is this relevant?" Each stage contains all types of small moving parts to make this pressure reduction happen. Some plastic, some steel and some rubber. When salt, comes to contact with these, they will eventually become eroded and not work properly causing the regulator to not deliver enough flow for the demand of the diver or causing it to free flow losing copious amounts of air which the last time I checked, is bad. So even if someone dives a couple of times a year, the regulator still can have salt crystals that build up and cause corrosion causing the regulator to not function properly. Besides servicing your regs, maintaining it after each dive is crucially important. Be sure to rinse in clean freshwater after each dive to decrease the amount of corrosion that is formed. Even if diving in freshwater or chlorinated water, it is still just as important to rinse and soak your regs. Most freshwater is not the cleanest and chlorine will kill SCUBA gear quickly. Having your gear serviced is also very important to the warranty of the regulator itself. Not getting it serviced according to the manufacturer's recommendations can void the warranty and can also make the service more expensive since the parts now have to be purchased instead of being free. Most manufacturer's include the rebuild kits as long as the regulator is serviced when it is supposed to. When we service your gear, we take it all apart and inspect each piece carefully and give it the TLC it deserves. We replace all the O rings even if they look fine (even though they look ok, they still can have deterioration when looking under a microscope.) We take all the metal out and put it in a special cleaner to remove all the corrosion and then we dry it off and polish it. Each plastic piece is then inspected and replaced as needed. Once we are happy, we put it all together and then test it out to make sure it functions properly. If one thing seems off, then we take it apart again and find out what is going on. If we would not dive with it, then we would not want you too either. In conclusion, taking care and getting your gear serviced is very important to increase the life of your equipment as well as your life. Remember, this is life support equipment and should be treated with the upmost respect. We love to service regs here at AES and we will make sure to treat yours as if it was our own. Until next time, we wish you well and safe exploration of the aquatic realm.