I abused some hollow pool noodles.
I bought ’em cheap. I used them, outdoors, year-round.
Two+ years straight, with a few hours’ sun per day. UV and weather did the rest.
They’re crunchy now. The top surface is mostly gone. The near-surface layer is a fragile network of tiny brittle plastic plates, all that’s left of the original foam. The interior portion isn’t fragile to the touch, but it has lost all spring.
These pool noodles now shed (microplastic, no less) and they don’t spring back. Grab one tightly and your hand print remains in the noodle. As below. And your hand is covered in plastic dust.
Those noodles shall now be given a decent burial. They shall be bagged and sent off to be burned by Fairfax County. Just another part of the household solid waste stream.
I had not fully grasped that foam would become instant microplastics as it degenerates. But it sure makes sense that foam would disintegrate to dust, more or less.
Mea Kinda Culpa
This should be avoided, if possible. By this, I mean converting foam into outdoor microplastic-flake generators in a couple of years. This is a possibly Bad Thing, and should be avoided, surely if it’s easy to do so.
In my defense, I knew enough not use indoor plastic for this. I used a pool noodle which, presumably, should have been expected to live a fair bit of its life in direct sunlight. But not two years straight, outdoors, for a consumer-grade noodle.
Also in my defense, this is a classic example of a motto from Watch Wes Work: It’s only temporary, unless it works. In this case, the PVC-pipe and pool noodle prototype lasted two years.
I wouldn’t make that mistake twice, or where DIY goes to die.
I’m now upgrading my home-made garage bumpers. These stood at the narrow entrance to my garage. Each was made from a PVC “three-way elbow” with three pieces of pipe friction-fit. Pool noodles fit over the vertical pipe. Bricks weighted down the two horizontal legs. The idea is that you’ll hit these (and they’ll move) before your front bumper contacts the side of the garage entrance.
The replacements use the same upright foam-covered PVC pipe, but a) with some UV protection, b) on better foam, c)held up by a home-made concrete stanchion base.
Why this design? These days, my home DIY projects are mainly guided by one rule: Does it use up stuff I already own?
For starters, I own a bag of geniune Sakrete, sitting in my garage for years now. It’s partially “gone off”, that is, begun to clump and set, but there’s more than enough loose concrete left to makes some concrete-based stanchions, setting up below. I hope.
The concrete forms are used food containers. I “buttered and floured” them with grease (bought for a boat motor long since gone) and retro-reflecting “sand” (bought for a project for a church I no longer attend.) With any luck, they’ll release easily and result in concrete that glows when struck by headlights. (That’s excess sand poured on top, above.)
Again referring to what I already owned, I spray-painted some heavy-weight pipe insulating foam, and sprinkled retroreflecting “sand” on the wet paint, as well.
Conclusion
We’ll see how the whole thing turns out. It takes a long time for concrete to set and paint to dry in cold weather.
Source: Penn State College of Engineering
Whether the paint and the different plastic will stop the sun-rotting, that’s anybody’s guess.
What I should use is AC-unit outdoor pipe insulation, because that’s specifically sold for year-round outdoor use. Painted and sprinkled, or plain, that’s the right foam for this application. I just don’t happen to have any.
If this current version of the garage bumper fails, well, then it was only temporary. I’ll have the good sense now to change the foam before it starts to fall to pieces. I think.
