- Hi guys, I'm Mark,
a scuba diving instructor from Safe Diving.
- And I'm Mark Evans,
Editor-in-chief of "Scuba Diver Magazine."
- So in this series of videos,
we're going to be taking a closer look
at an entire range of the newest scuba diving equipment,
and all of these videos are sponsored by Mike's Dive Store,
the UK's largest scuba diving retailer,
and they hold most of these items in stock at all times.
- They're also doing their bit for sustainability
by moving to eco-friendly packaging.
And they also donate 1% of all their online profits
to the marine conservation charity, Sea Changes.
- So let's jump straight in.
(upbeat music)
Okay and here we have the Spare Air.
So this is effectively a teeny, tiny cylinder
with a regulator attached,
and it acts as a completely redundant backup.
So what you basically do is you fill this up
on your primary tank before the dive,
and then you kind of store this on a webbing strap
and then if something should happen,
in the unlikely event that you run out of air,
you have a completely independent air source
that you can switch to and then get to a buddy
or get to the surface.
So this is the box that it comes in,
a pretty standard cardboard box.
And then if we open it up, you have the Spare Air itself,
but we'll take a closer look at that in a moment,
because you also get underneath this section, the charger.
So if I move the cardboard box...
Okay, so to be able to recharge this,
you have this section here
and this A-clamp is going to go over your cylinder valve
like a big 12 liter or something,
and then that's how you're going to charge up
and pressurize the actual Spare Air.
You also have a safety leash,
just a sort of a spring bungee cable
just so that it stays attached and you can't drop it.
And you also get some silicone grease
because silicone grease is always useful.
Okay, on to the main sort of part of it.
So this is Spare Air.
So as you can see, it comes in a pouch
and this has a few attachment points,
so you have lots of sort of webbing loops,
so you can thread it pretty much wherever you want
and you can even wrap it around things.
You can remove these straps if you don't want them
so there's lots of attachment points.
On this side, we have a tiny little webbing loop,
so that's mainly for that lanyard just to keep it attached.
And you do have another one on the other side
that holds onto this mouthpiece.
So this mouthpiece is actually covering up
the primary mouthpiece and that stops any kind of silt
or any gunk from getting in the mouthpiece.
That way you know that it's nice and fresh
and you can take a deep breath of air from it.
On this model, you can see it actually has
a pressure gauge on the sides,
so you can actually see how much gas you have
and make sure that it is full before your dive.
And then if you do need to deploy it,
a big plastic D-ring, something to really grab hold of.
(Velcro ripping)
Velcro opening makes it really quick and easy.
You can then pull it out and as you pull it out
you see how it's pulling that mouthpiece off,
so that way it's nice and secure.
So in this section here, this big sort of plastic head,
this is effectively your regulator,
and then below it, you have your cylinder.
So all the compressed air is stored inside of here,
and then you effectively have a first stage
and a second stage built into the top here.
So you can breathe through the mouthpiece
just like a traditional second stage,
and if you need to, this is actually your purge button,
so press that and that will sort of purge
any water out of it, and it's effectively
a self-contained sort of scuba cylinder.
And that's the Spare Air cylinder,
just a small redundant backup just to get you out of dodge,
just to get you to your buddy
if you're a little bit too far away from them.
It gives you that sort of valuable
few breaths of air underwater just to get you to safety.
For more safety equipment,
don't forget to visit mikesdivestore.com
or you can visit them in store in London.
If you enjoyed this video,
don't forget to like, share and subscribe
to the Scuba Diver Magazine channel
to see more videos like this
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so you are notified every time we upload a video.
Don't forget if you want to sort of watch more videos
like this, then you can click on this playlist here
to look at our scuba diving basics video,
or if you want something a little bit more advanced,
you can click on this playlist.
Thanks for watching and safe diving.
(upbeat music)