Sigh! I guess the point is still being missed. It isn't hard at
all to keep water in a container. The plastic water bottle scenario
was created to put the issue into perspective. Perhaps some plastic
bottles don't have the staying power to last into the next century,
but that doesn't in any way indicate that it is a difficult problem.
There are metal cans that have held liquids for centuries. There
are glass, and ceramic bottles that have held liquids for thousands
of years.
Surely if you wanted to use a quantity of water to act as a thermal
ballast, or cushion, it would be worth the tiny amount of effort
necessary to enclose it? Perhaps something glued up out of Schedule
40 PVC pipe? Or maybe a Nalgene bottle? Or a thick walled LDPE
bottle? Even a concrete tank wouldn't be out of the question if
you needed a big enough ballast. There are concrete basins that
have been holding water for decades.
Don't let the fact that water might leak dissuade you from using
it as a cheap highly capable thermal ballast.
-Chuck Harris
Thomas A. Frank wrote:
More to the point, you will be disappointed to find the bottles will NOT
last that long.
Cleaning out the cupboard recently, I can across some bottled water that
had 1998 date codes. Several had leaked, but one was still intact
enough to show the likely problem. It would appear that over the past
10 years, the gases dissolved in the water migrated through the plastic
(or the cap seal), resulting in a vacuum forming in the bottle. This
distended the bottles and caused structural failure.
Either that, or the water caused the plastic to shrink.
Glass would probably fair better.
Tom Frank, KA2CDK
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