Balloon in Wine Bottle

There was a disagreement at work about how well hand vacuum pumps for wine bottles work. So I brought my wine bottle pump and a bag of balloons and someone else brought in an empty sparkling cider bottle. We put a balloon in the bottle and held the end of the balloon. A coworker used a coffee stirrer to push on the neck of the balloon to keep it from filling the neck of the wine bottle while he blew into the balloon. It took him a few tries, but he got enough air into the balloon so that it was stretching a little and then tied the end. Then he pushed the balloon so it fell to the bottom of the bottle. Then I used the wine bottle pump just as I would when trying to preserve wine. The balloon grew as I pumped out the air in the bottle. The growth was very noticeable, but very far from filling the entire bottle. We made a very rough guess that the volume of the balloon increased by 4x. I think that means I pumped out 75% of the air in the bottle. That's more than I expected and I think enough to justify using the pump.

The next part of the challenge is to see if the stopper's seal holds over several days. So the bottle with the balloon in it is sitting under the desk in an empty cube (no one wanted a bottle sitting in their cube). On Tuesday we'll check how big the balloon looks (very tough to tell much from this since no way to compare the size - I tried to take a picture, but the bottle was dark enough it didn't really work, see below). The other test will be pushing on the valve and listening for the air going into the bottle.

Well it is about as far from scientific as you can get, but I'd say the bottle pump is worthwhile.

Look for the pink blur at the bottom of the bottle: