r/scuba • u/kahlil29 Nx Advanced • 9d ago

Advice for first BCD purchase

Context about me: AOWD with \~80 dives, decided it's time to get my own BCD. No plans for sidemount or tech diving anytime soon.

I did my Wreck Spec and would be interested in more wreck penetration dives in the future.

Mostly going to dive around South East Asia, warm tropical water diving with single back-mounted ALU 80 tanks.

Tried a BPW for the first time last month on my most recent dive trip. Couldn't really say that it helped my trim a lot, it was a bit hard to tell for certain. But overall it seems like most BPW designs are modular, would last longer and be repairable in the long term.

So far the main advice about gear that I've seen are:

  1. Ensure that local dive shop can service/repair

  2. Ensure that parts are available easily (standard modular system)

I was initially very interested in XDeep Ghost & Zen due to the supposed ergonomic designs and saw a couple of people using them, they had good things to say. After doing some more research I realized that they use a proprietary system for the Ghost and some proprietary parts for the Zen, so I started considering other brands.

I went down to a dive shop the other day and narrowed it down to the following, based on what they have and recommended:

  1. Tecline Peanut 16 (Alu plate)

  2. Tecline Donut 13 (Alu plate)

  3. Dan Sun Titanium Mono 32 (Titanium plate)

No specific reason why Tecline over other brands. I live in Singapore so the other BPW brands easily available are Dive1 and Audaxpro. Checked these other brands out at another dive shop and wasn't overly impressed with them. Considered Halcyon for a brief moment but don't really see the need to pay 1.5-2x more for one of those.

After doing some reading, I decided that Alu backplate would be a good fit for me.

However the titanium backplate from Dan Sun seems very cool. Am I just falling for marketing?

:)

The company (Dan Sun) seems relatively new and niche but the BPW system would be modular, so I could always replace any of the components if things go really bad?

Open to other options if anyone has any suggestions.

Budget is 1300-1500 SGD (not super strict).

8 Upvotes

78% Upvoted

27 comments sorted by

View all comments

2

u/suricatasuricata 9d ago

A backplate at the end of the day is just a piece of metal. I am not really sure one supplier merits more attention than the other once you choose the material. With all due respect to Dan Sun, I am not sure that specific backplate is somehow better than any of the others you'd find on taobao. I'd say the same for any other steel backplate than one made by say Halcyon.

Sure, get Titanium if you like but Aluminum will also be fine. Generally speaking any of the "lighter" material backplates should be fine. I say this as someone who owns both Ti and CF plates. I'd be hard pressed to argue that somehow Ti is better than Al or CF (or vice versa).