Submitted by: Ryan Yuen, Dive Officer II, California Academy of Sciences
Problem Summary:
Convenient and quick way to disinfect then rinse your BC bladder, while limiting having the masses of your dive team unscrewing BC dump ports, then forgetting to reinstall or cross thread them back on.
Solution and Items Needed:
1x – Liter or Gallon Bottle with 1.5in diameter opening
1x – Cap with Garden Hose Adapter (brand SmartBottle)
1x – BC- Garden Hose Flush Adapter
2x – Quick Disconnect Sets for Garden Hose
Save a screw top jug of your choice to fill with a disinfect of your choice. Utilizing a commercial market-ready cap adapter, you can connect your jug to a standard QD Garden hose fitting. The Cap Adapter is sold at many different online stores, but seems to come from the brand Smart Bottle.
For use, you can quick-connect your disinfectant bottle to a commercial BC Fill hose and invert the bottle. Next squeeze both the bottle and inflate button on your power inflator and you should be able to fill a good amount of disinfectant into your BC.
Slosh your BC around, wait up to 10 minutes for “disinfectant contact time”, then empty the disinfectant through a dump port. Quick-connect a garden hose to your BC fill hose and repeat the similar process for a freshwater rinse out.
Side note: If you find flow lacking, you can remove the Schrader valve in your BC fill hose to increase volume of flow.
