[Ermine] Re: One Weakness

Not *entirely* off-topic... <g>

• Kazmira

In today's Boston Globe:
>
> What's duct tape good for? Just about everything, it seems, from making
>stopgap repairs on briefcases and upholstery or household tools and
>appliances to patching holes in the screen porch. Whatever it is, if it's
>broken, duct tape can probably fix it. Okay, what's duct tape no good for?
>Taping ducts. And that's straight from a team of scientists working at a
>major government research lab. After three months of rigorous comparison
>testing at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a US Department of
>Energy facility that spends most of its time trying to develop things like
>futuristic fusion-powered generating systems, the team concluded that the
>ubiquitous, ultra-sticky gray stuff we call duct tape fared worse than
>everything else they tried when it came to sealing ductwork in heating and
>air conditioning systems.
>
>
> ``We tried as many different kinds of duct sealants as we could get our
>hands on,'' said Max Sherman, head of the Energy Performance of Buildings
>group at the prestigious California lab. ``Of all the things we tested,
>only duct tape failed. It failed reliably, and often quite
>catastrophically.''
>
>
> It may be great for keeping the cuffs of your pants out of the spokes
>of bicycle wheels. It may even, as some people swear, be good for getting
>rid of warts (try this at your own risk; the folks at the lab haven't
>tested this claim yet). But as strong and sticky as duct tape is when you
>apply it, apparently it's going to need a new name. Put it on a duct, and
>it's going to crack, split, and fall off before you can say ``jumping
>heating bills!''
>
> And that's the issue, say the earnest government scientists. Duct tape
>may sound like a frivolous subject for research, but the fact is that an
>enormous amount of energy is wasted if hot air spews out of joints in the
>ductwork and ends up heating the basement, crawlspace or the insides of
>walls, instead of your home. In the Berkeley tests (which tortured the tape
>with rapid heating and cooling cycles to produce accelerated aging) most of
>the duct tape failed within days. Most of the joints ended up spewing out
>at least half as much air as they did before the tape was applied.
>Everything else the researchers tried worked better: Clear tape,
>foil-backed tape, mastic, and a newly-developed aerosol sealant all held up
>under the tough testing. Only the duct tape failed.
>
> The aerosol sealant, developed at the Berkeley lab, worked best of all -
>and it may be the easiest to use. Instead of laboriously taping or painting
>the material over every joint, you simply squirt the spray through the duct
>system; it settles into the leaky places and seals them shut. After two
>years of testing, those seals were still holding like new.
>
> Details of the energy lab's findings were published
>this summer in Home Energy magazine. But the work leaves one lingering
>question. Among the various kinds of duct tape the team tested,there was
>one - which worked no better than the others - that was described as

>``nuclear grade.''
>
> Just what, exactly, is that being used for?
>
> On second thought, maybe we don't want to know.
>

--+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+--- From: Tamara Duran <tamara_duran@harvard.edu> (by way of Sarah Dorrance <sarah.dorrance@oriel.oxford.ac.uk>) --+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+--- Received on Mon Aug 31 18:49:58 1998