preferred vendor for glass acid bottles?

I, and quite a few others, avoid using glass bottles for storing acids as they are so easy to break and not all that necessary. And as you've found out, the borosilicate bottles are expensive!

I buy concentrated sulphuric, hydrochloric and ammonia in HDPE bottles and they do, for all intents, nothing to the plastic.

A bigger problem is solvents, which can leach through the plastics over time, dissolve them or leach trace contaminants out. When people start doing chemistry, there is always a tendency to let solvents evaporate off into the air for simplicity. The more and more experience they get, the more they realise, it's going to cost a fortune to keep rebuying the solvents every time hundreds of mls of them need to come off. So they get recovered, complete with trace contaminants. Over time, they then realise those contaminants are having an effect, so they begin cleaning their solvents.

Eventually, when looking at researchers in universities, they've switched to assuming it's all shit to start with, and re-distil the volume they need immediately prior to use.

Borosilicate bottles are often used in labs to ensure it's as unreactive as the glassware being used and for high purity work; the solvent bottles for HPLC are those kind, where any minute trace of contamination is likely to show up on the output, the blown glass can also tolerate pressure differentials better, but I would be very cautious with that idea. The majority of supplier chemicals that don't come in HDPE come in standard glass Winchester bottles. These are moulded rather than blown, and far cheaper than the blown borosilicate.

The caps on some Winchesters are R6. But the newer ones are GL45.

The caps on normal sized blown bottles, like the Schott Durans, are GL45, or one of the other GL sizes. The number is their diameter. The GL system is being used as a standard because it allows adaptors to be screwed onto the bottle, such as dispensing pipettes and ported caps for chromatography systems, there are even adaptors to fit standard taper glassware to the threads. The blown bottles can also be used on roller mixers to agitating biological cultures without damaging the cells with stir bars and pumps.

GL is a DIN standard. There's 45, 32 and 25. That's all you need to worry about. Pick the right number, screw it on.

I would still recommend HDPE for most stuff. It's only second to PTFE in terms of plastics and most chemicals. The thick walled HDPE bottles cost about the same as the moulded Winchesters. PTFE bottles are eye watering price wise. I would suggest you go for thick walled HDPE. The thinner walls are next to impossible to break, but they're flexible, which makes it easier to spill stuff.

This question has come up a few times. We should have our own SM Wiki. I know ?home chemist? has one, but there seem to be barely any users on there.

These 1000ml Winchesters are £33 for 12



These 1000ml Schott Durans are £75 for 10, and that's likely without the VAT (an extra 20%)


A GL45 to B24 cap


The inside


Fits this big 10l bottle I have. I only really use this for temporarily storing and pooling results. For instance, I poured all the litres of crude benzene in there since I didn't want it all over the place in beakers and other bottles, and I needed to wash it with litres of water


That's a 2.5l moulded Winchester from a lab supplier, full of ethyl acetate. The standard GL45 cap fits fine. The black cap in my hand is a GL45.


That's a HDPE bottle of concentrated sulphuric. The only trace of anything happening is the foam liner under the cap being a faint yellow / brown tint. The rest of the plastic is fine. The linear is fine actually, I can turn the bottle upside down and nothing will come out. I could also drop it on the floor and all it might do is leave a scuff.


Here's another example of a specialised GL cap, with multiple ports. This allows them to be easily connected to chromatography pumps. The ports can also be used for things like sparging gas, microbial filters, nutrient lines, overhead stirrers and other fun stuff when growing a culture in the bottle; a more advanced form of sticking a wad of cotton wool in the top of a demijohn.


A GL bottle / flask / vessel complete with bits for cell culture


GL45 bottles feeding a chromatography system


GL45 bottle dispensers


[Edited on 24-7-2011 by peach]