Well it happened... during the GUE - EDGE I called out for the depth gauge / bottom timer check and low and behold I noticed that my dive computer was blank. I hit the right button and nothing. Hit it again and it finally did the pre-flight check and at the end I got the dreaded Batt. Thankfully my dive buddy Casey Offord had a spare depth gauge / bottom timer on him and was willing to loan it out. I strapped it on and off we went. I knew well before the dive the battery was low.

I purposely held off changing the battery to see how long it would actually last "real world". I noticed that the battery was running low about 5 dives ago. Not very scientific but again real world usually isn't. A few months back I did an initial review of the Oceanic Veo 2.0 dive computer and the link is below if you're interested. The last time I changed the battery was at dive 46. Today was dive 156, a difference of 110 dives to be exact or 109 dives if you want to be picky. I got more then double the dives I got off of the original Panasonic factory battery but it's still way off of what Oceanic claims it's capable of.

To be fair when I got home I dumped all of my gear in the tub to do the ritual cleaning of the dive gear. After removing the dive computer from the rinse I noticed that it was once again "on" and the low battery indicator was actually off which was surprising. This leads me to believe that if I were somewhere tropical with warmer temperatures I probably would have gotten another dive off of it. This also leads me to believe that in the colder weather and waters of the Pacific Northwest I should also expect lower run times between battery changes.

Regardless I'm happy with the dive computer. It does exactly what it claims to and more. Considering I usually run it in "gauge" mode it does way more then I need it to. For shits and giggles I sometimes program 32% as my mix just to compare the rule of 130 to that of the Pelagic DSAT algorithm which is based similarly off of the NOAA dive tables. I noticed that the rule of 130 compared to the computer is much more conservative. Overall it's a solid dive computer and it just works. Sure there are fancier computers but the question is do I really need one?

Oceanic Veo 2.0 - Personal Dive Computer - Battery Life