packing peanuts??

Anyone ever used packing peanuts instead of the two-part pourable foam?

Re: packing peanuts??

They break down too easy and are not dense enough. You can use empty plastice bottles such as a soda bottle (with the top tightly on).

Re: packing peanuts??

i'd rather use 2 liter bottles.

Re: packing peanuts??

Yea....not much room for the bottles.....just thought I'd throw it out there.....a guy locally here has about half a semi of the bagged peanuts to give away for free but I'll just go with something else

Re: packing peanuts??

88wellcraft said:

Anyone ever used packing peanuts instead of the two-part pourable foam?

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Yes they have been used, here is the guy who did the testing.. http://www.shortypen.com/boats/oday19/float/index.htm

I love the fact that out of the 3 foam products he tested, only the pour in place foam, that everyone advocates using, soaked up water..

I am an advocate for building foam.. http://www.shareaproject.com/pages/imageDetail,p,148,i,2768,00.html

Re: packing peanuts??

tashasdaddy said:

i'd rather use 2 liter bottles.

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Packed full of peanut's, double your pleasure and have twice the fun....

Re: packing peanuts??

If you are considering packing peanuts, make sure that they are not of the biodegradable type. There are some packing peanuts made that are formulated from what I believe is corn oil or something similar. They are made to dissolve if left to the elements fairly rapidly so as not to pollute the landfills. I had a careless UPS driver bust open a package the contained a bunch of these a few years ago. Since it was raining out, I didn't do a very throrough job of chasing down all the stray peanuts, but found that by the next morning they had all but dissolved into nothing but sticky little globs, by the next day they were gone.

I just tore the floor out of an old aluminum boat that had loose peanuts in it for flotation, while most were intact, many of them had sort of degraded to small pieces. Going by the type of flooring and age of the boat I would guess that they had been in there for 30+ years.

I do not like any of the pour in foam flotation that I have seen. I just spent three days digging out twenty 55 drums worth of heavy saturated foam from a 21' hull. None of that foam had retained any flotation ability.
I like the idea of soda bottles, they will probably outlast most of us and they will never absorb water. They also do not trap water or block bilge drains as does pour in foam and loose peanuts.

I just picked up one older boat made by Aero Craft that has a unique design that eliminates the need for flotation all together, both gunwales are completely sealed and form two huge air chambers for flotation, the total area is about equal to say a 12" round tube and about 18' long on each side. So long as the upper hull is not comprimised in a collision, the hull will float. The only drawback to this design is that cutting holes for things like rod holders in the tops of the gunwales can ruin the flotation feature.

Re: packing peanuts??

I like the safety of having floatation. But I worry about the soda bottle idea because when a boat swamps, depending on where the floation is in the boat, the transom sinks deep with the weight of the outboard, and the bow sticks up. That puts the soda bottles as much as 8 feet or more below the surface, depending on the length of your boat. At only 4 feet, an air filled soda bottle starts to collapse, making it lose it boyancy because it is displacing less and less water as the water pressure is crushing it, causing it to sink, causing it to crush more and more the deeper it sinks.

Just something to think about when using soda bottles.

Bottles will work better if foam filled.

Also, if you read the Coast Guard regs on floatation, they recomend putting the floatation as high as possable, and leave the under floor area open so it will flood. This keeps the boat from rolling over and allows the people to stay in the swamped boat (shark protection?) rather than hang onto an upside down hull (shark bait?).

Re: packing peanuts??

i used those waternoodles you get at wal-mart and the likes.good flotation and inexpensive and water proof.

Re: packing peanuts??

i used both. the two part stuff which is 120 bucks a gallon here in canada. but i had a about 3 inches of space left so i used building styrofoam. i felt bad for doing it at the time, but after reading this, i feel better. lol. the old foam i took out of my boat was water logged. i bet i remove about 50 to 60 lbs of water soaked foam.

Re: packing peanuts??

I'll second the water noodles..you can get them at the dollar store in bulk. Tie together or cut to fit, they allow water to go to the bilge and don't get water logged. Heck if one noodle can keep me floating in the lake think what 50 of them could do.

Re: packing peanuts??

Depending on the weight of the boat, but a subfloor full of soda bottles would be pretty tought o get down to 4 feet? Besides they would certain retain far more floatation than a bag of packing peanuts. The float noodles are a good idea, but I think depending on each individual case you may end up with a combination of several types of flotation. On the two boats I am doing here, I will do a combination of soda bottles, noodles and some cut to fit white foam blocks, but after shoveling out two truck loads of heavy wet yellow foam out of a boat the other day, there's no way that stuff's going back in.

Re: packing peanuts??

Water noodles make cheap dock bumpers too. I'm all for a bunch of them instead of foam. On my Merc overpowered 16 foot Flatbottom, I have a bare hull with a couple seats, and just shoved 4 2x4 2 inch thick sheets of R-TECH Insulfoam building foam up in the bow. Put them in a heavy duty 55 gallon plastic bag and taped it up pretty. Its good enough to keep the bow afloat if I flip it, and that all you need...something to hang on too while waiting for help..