2 thoughts on “Trash bags work instead of balloons and cost $1.30 each”

  1. From experience, the only problem is that they will leak more Helium, well at least comparing cheap plastic waste bags with the ~$20 balloons I bought. This is only a problem if you want to keep the camera up with the same balloon multiple times over several says. Would be nice to know more what you found, maybe you bags are better than mine, and I’m guessing you have free helium in that machine hall.

  2. Actually I found that the party balloons I bought wouldn’t fly after staying inflated overnight. The other nice thing is that the balloons got stretched out and delicate after leaving them inflated, whereas I could just top off the trash bag a couple days later… it lost about 30-50% of its helium after 2 days.

    Oddly, the party balloons didn’t seem to be smaller the next day, but they had less lift. I wonder if somehow they filled with air, or something. But maybe they were smaller and I just didn’t measure.

    For more discussion on this, I’d encourage you to join the Grassroots Mapping mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/grassrootsmapping/

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