This is the official Social Diving scuba diving air consumption calculator. It’s free to use and I hope it will help you in planning your dives.

Scuba diving air consumption calculator

All you need to do is enter your desired diving depth, info about your scuba tank, and your respiratory minute volume (RMV). If you don’t know your RMV, use the RMV calculator below to find out.

[Tool] Air Consumption Calculator
meters
bar
L/min
L
min
L

How to read these results


Your respiratory minute volume is L/minute and you want to dive at a maximum operating depth of meters.

Using a tank that’s initially filled to bar will allow for a bottom time of ~ minutes until you reach the safety reserve of 50 bar.

The expected air consumption during this time is L.

Please note that these are only estimates and by no means replace a thorough dive plan!

Respiratory Minute Volume Calculator & Surface Average Consumption

If you don’t know your RMV (respiratory minute volume), enter the numbers from a previous dive and find out.

You can then use these values to enter your RMV above for a calculation of your expected air consumption.

The average RMV is somewhere between 12-25 L/min.

[Tool] RMV & SAC calculator
bar
meters
bar
bar
minutes
L/min
L

How to read these results


The respiratory minute volume tells you your average consumption of air while scuba diving. 

It can be used to quickly make estimates on how long your tank will last underwater and help you in your dive plans.

During a previous dive to you used a L tank with a maximum tank pressure of bar.

The dive lasted minutes and you used up bar.

This leads to a respiratory minute volume of L/min. So, on average, you use up   liters of air per minute when you’re underwater.

If you had spent the entire dive at the surface, the equivalent surface air consumption (SAC) would have been liters.

You can now use these numbers in the calculator above to plan your dives.

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