I am having some serious problems with cold water and battery life, after 2.5 hrs in the water today my video flood, strobes and eventually camera all had dead batteries. All were fully charged or new before the dive, my dive computer also ate batteries dropping 40% where normally it would drop about 4% battery over the same time.
The only thing I can think of is the effect of cold water cooling down the batteries. The air temp was -2 deg C and the surface water around 5 deg C.
Any tips or pointers would be appreciated.
Cheers Pete
Has to be, right, as it impacted all (?) of your electronics. Have any of them revived?
Presumably you weren't drawn into some alien space ship?
I see this same phenomenon when shooting in Alaska during the autumn when ambient tempertures, both water and air, are near freezing. NiMH and to some extent Li batteries show reductions in capacity. One has to live with it, bring batteries to swap out, etc. The shorter day length makes this problem easier to deal with ;-> I typically plant my camera set-ups in a stream for multiple hours at a time; fewer hours as the season progresses.
BTW I have had zeroed out batteries (Seacam strobes have nifty battery charge indicators) show non-zero charge levels back at home after warming.
Cheers for the responses, My video flood revived to some extent when it warmed up but the strobes and camera needed new / recharged batteries. Next time I will give some lithium batteries a try rather than eneloop ones in my strobes. I may also try keeping the kit in cooler of warm water before hand rather than sitting in -2 deg C air.
Its either that or the underwater creatures from the Abyss are hanging out off the west coast, incidentally the " abyss" is the whole reason i spend a fortune getting cameras wet.
If you are going yo use the warm cooler trick, make sure to only open your housing in a low humidity environment prior to diving. If not, you might get fogging issues when submerging the housing in cold water.
