Originally posted by Russell W. Barnes Has anyone here ever used non-porous ceramic baking beans to displace the air in developer bottles? I have several dark-brown 200ml - 350ml glass bottles into which I shall distribute my stock ID-11, and I thought I'd make it last a bit longer by displacing the air from each partially-used one as I go.
I've heard about folks using glass marbles to do this.
Marbles work, but can be rather fiddly. I kept a can of Dust-Off around for this sort of thing. It's an oxygen free gas that is quite inert and is heavier than air. I'd just squirt a little bit of canned gas into the bottle and let it do what it did.
It seemed to work. I could keep developers for a very long time with no problems.
Later I started using a JOBO processor, which used very small amounts of solution compared to vertical tanks. In order to have sufficient capacity, one needed very concentrated developers (and very careful timing as development times were in the range of 3 minutes). My developer of choice became HC:110, as I was able to mix it strong enough to work for me.
As it is a very concentrated liquid, more like syrup, and on it's own very resistant to oxidizing, I was able to give up trying to keep developers from going bad. I used a pipette to grab what I needed to make a tank mix, and did one shot developing.