Quote:
Originally Posted by CJL
For years we have ordered lifejackets with a auto salt crystal heads and a harness and only one has come back to me after being accidentally set off. Thats 200+ lifejackets over 2 years!......
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I think it depends on what you are doing with them, I take it you are issuing these for use on ship
which I would argue is a very different environment to a rib.
Quote:
Originally Posted by CJL
.....I doubt very very much there is any substance into the realiability of the autos vs the manuals. .....
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If you have one firing mechanism one thing can go wrong, if you have two firing mechanisms two things can go wrong, which makes it less reliable than the first system.
Equally you could argue that it makes it twice as likely to work when operated. I think that like a lot of safety systems you only really want a lifejacket to work once, the time you are drowning and there is nothing else to help you. But a lifejacket spends most of its time waiting for that moment and how well it waits is the critical thing.
If you think of smoke alarms most of the time you are waving a newspaper at them when you’ve burnt the toast or you are pulling out the battery cos it has spent half the night beeping at you because the battery is going flat. Both of these features make the alarm less reliable, in other words you can not rely on it. If smoke alarms only went off when the house was on fire and you were going to die they would be 100% reliable.