Scuba Weight Calculator

Welcome to our scuba weight calculator. Whether you're an amateur or advanced scuba diver, you may wonder how much ballast will be optimum on your diving weight belt. Additionally, when you visit the dive center, you will often be asked, "how much weight do you need?".

This scuba diving weight calculator will help you to estimate how much weight to wear for scuba diving. Try our scuba diving weight calculator to make your diving more pleasant.

First of all, we should answer the question, what is buoyancy? Buoyancy, otherwise called the upthrust, is the force acting in a direction opposite to gravity that prevents a floating object from sinking: we explored this concept thoroughly at our buoyancy calculator. When the object is immersed in water (or any other liquid), its weight pulls it downwards. Buoyancy opposes that weight and has a magnitude directly proportional to the fluid volume that would otherwise occupy the space taken by the object. In other words, it has a magnitude equivalent to the volume of the displaced liquid. You may read more about buoyancy in our Archimedes' principle calculator.

So why is neutral buoyancy so crucial for a scuba diver? When you can control your buoyancy, it will let you decide where you want to be underwater, what to do, and where to dive. It will also help you to save energy. Most of the time, you should be neutral buoyant during your dive, weightless, almost like an astronaut; it will let you swim in your chosen direction, almost without effort.

To control buoyancy, scuba divers use a diving weight belt and BCD (Buoyancy Control Device) jacket, which may be inflated or deflated by air during the dive. It will help the diver to achieve neutral buoyancy anytime during the dive.

Several factors may significantly impact your buoyancy. Correct weighting depends on your buoyancy, which is different for each of us and is influenced by several factors like:

• body weight;
• equipment weight (mask, gloves, boots, camera, BCD, regulator, knife, etc.);
• body composition;
• water density (sea water is around 1030 kg/m³, while freshwater is 1000 kg/m³);
• tank (steel or aluminum);
• wetsuit (the thicker the wetsuit that you use, the more weights in the diving weight belt you're going to need); and
• your diving experience (this is the main reason why calculating exactly how much weight to wear scuba diving may be difficult).

You can check the water density with different salinity with the water density calculator.

When diving, the colder the water temperature, the thicker the wetsuit you need to keep warm. But how cold water is and how thick the wetsuit needs to be is also affected by your personal tolerance to the cold.

Here's our wetsuit temperature guide:

• 26-28 °C (79-82 °F) – full-length 1-2 mm wetsuit.
• 22-25 °C (72-77 °F) – full-length 5 mm wetsuit.
• 18-21 °C (64-70 °F) – full-length 7 mm wetsuit

Remember that the deeper you dive, the colder the temperature of the water will be, so you should consider a thicker wetsuit. In addition to how easily you feel the cold, consider the topside conditions between dives on your dive interval, but also take account of the depth of your dive too.

Many factors will affect how warm or cold you feel on a dive. You should remember that water sucks the heat out of your body 25 times faster than the air of the same temperature.

The wetsuit also has a significant impact on your buoyancy and the weights you should carry. That's why you should select the appropriate wet suit in the scuba weight calculator.

To find out how much weight to wear scuba diving with our scuba weight calculator:

1. Enter your body and equipment mass, or total diver mass, which is a sum of the two values.
2. Select a wet suit.
3. Select water type (fresh, brackish, salty).
4. Select tank type and volume (aluminum or steel).
5. You will find the answer to the question how much weight do I need for diving? at the end of the calculator.

Please remember that the scuba diving weight calculator will help you to choose estimated weights, and you should always ask your dive master what weights are optimal for you, especially if you're a beginner. The best solution is to check your buoyancy before diving in a swimming pool, which you may find in your diving center.