Keep Track of Dive Gear: Service, Setup, Kit

Dive gear is life-support equipment that lives in salt water and closets. Keeping track of it means three things: knowing when each item was last serviced, knowing your own setup numbers, and noticing problems while they are still small. None of this requires a spreadsheet — but it does require writing things down.

Know your service intervals

Every manufacturer publishes service requirements; follow theirs over any rule of thumb. The common baselines:

Regulators. Typically an annual service or every 100 dives, whichever comes first — some manufacturers now allow two years between full services with annual inspections. Check your model’s manual; a warranty can depend on it.
BCD. Inspect before every trip: inflator button, dump valves, bladder integrity. Most manufacturers recommend periodic professional service of the inflator.
Tanks (if you own them). Visual inspection annually in most places, hydrostatic testing on a multi-year cycle — the interval is set by national regulations, so follow your local standard and your fill station’s requirements.
Dive computer. Battery changes per the manual, ideally with a pressure test after. Never start a trip on a low battery.
Wetsuits, fins, masks. No formal schedule — rinse in fresh water, dry out of the sun, and check zippers, straps, and buckles before each trip.

The tracking problem is simple: a year is long, and memory is short. Record the date and shop for every service, and put the next due date somewhere you will actually see it before your next trip, not after.

Keep a one-page gear record

For each major item, note five things once:

Brand, model, and serial number (essential for insurance and theft reports)
Purchase date and place
Last service date and shop
Next service due
Known quirks — “leaks slightly at the neck seal,” “inflator sticks when cold”

Serial numbers matter more than people think. Photograph each item and its serial once; a lost bag at an airport is a bad time to reconstruct what was in it.

Your setup numbers are gear data too

The most-consulted gear record any diver keeps is their weighting: how much lead, with which suit, in salt or fresh water, with which tank. Get in the habit of noting your configuration and how it felt on every dive — perfectly weighted, floaty at the safety stop, heavy on the surface. After a season you have a personal lookup table that removes all guesswork. My dive log checklist covers where this fits in a complete entry.

Log problems the day they happen

A free-flowing second stage, a slow leak at a hose fitting, a mask strap on its last fibers — these announce themselves on dives, weeks before they fail. The dive where it happened is the record: note it in that day’s log entry. When you next visit a service shop, you arrive with specifics (“free-flowed twice at depth in cold water, dives 84 and 87”) instead of “it acts weird sometimes.” If anything misbehaves that your training flags as serious, stop diving with it until a technician clears it — rental gear exists for a reason.

The pre-trip sweep

A week before any trip — enough time to fix what you find:

Assemble and pressurize the full rig; listen for leaks
Breathe both regulator stages
Inflate the BCD fully and let it sit overnight
Check computer battery and settings
Check mask, fins, snorkel, straps, and clips
Confirm nothing is past its service date

How I track gear in Tortuba

I built Tortuba as a dive log first, and it turns out a good dive log is a gear record. Each dive captures your parameters — and much more — plus written notes, so weights, suit, tank size, and any misbehaving equipment live in the entry where they happened, searchable later and available offline at the dive site. Get it down before the boat ride ends, as I suggest in how to log a scuba dive, and your gear history builds itself one dive at a time.

A refresh is coming to Tortuba — new UI, cloud sync — but the habit is available today: log the dive, note the gear, dive relaxed.