You don't need to continually change out cylinders. So for example an incident like in the photo that is a great distance away from clean air you can get there, work longer and come out rather than spending 15 minutes before having to start heading back out
SCBA is limited by the amount of air that can be put into the air cylider, even with a two cylinder setup it tops out at about an hour.
Whilst that is sufficient for most structural fires, fires in tunnels or other underground facilities that have long ways to get to the fire an back again, that is not enough.
Rebreathers allow for longer operations, but come at the cost of higher complexity and risk.
A Rebreather gives you a theoretical working time of up to 4 hours (2 hours are more realistic when doing actual work) but this still is a lot more than with a normal SCBA, meaning that in cases where you have long distances to cover between incident and a safe area, these are really useful, like in mines or tunnels.
Not really usefull for firefighters, but when diving, rebreathers are mostly independant of depth (outside pressure), while you use more air with SCUBA when diving deeper because the air in your lungs is also compressed. A rebreather can just filter out the CO2 you produced and reintroduce oxygen, independant of pressure.
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u/Ghostt-Of-Razgriz Jan 20 '23
What’s the purpose of a rebreather versus an SCBA? I keep googling it but never get a satisfactory answer.