• A good water bottle is a friend for life. We have a dozen in the cupboard:

    • several are plastic, mostly swag but a couple that are for bikes. They’re cheap, and one leaks from the lid, but I’m not going to buy another little, metal water bottle just for the bike. Plastic is mostly useless as they don’t keep liquids cool.
    • there are a few workout ones that are just tall cups with lids. Again, plastic; their one use is working out, because they don’t break or break things if they get dropped on the treadmill. I hate the lid mechanism.
    • there are a few metal ones; again, mostly swag. Two are actual thermoses with great insulation, but they’re relatively small (16 oz), and their sippy lids are clearly optimized for hot liquids the other metal ones have screw tops and are a PITA to use. In fact, one is my second most recent one, which I replaced because unscrewing the top in the middle of the night was fussy so I’d just leave the top off, except I kept knocking it over by fumbling for it in the dark, spoiling water all over the nightstand and carpet.
    • we have two glass ones, and one with an electric mixer base that I got for my wife for when she travels, so she can more easily have protein shakes in the morning. The glass ones are insulated and nice, but the tops don’t seal and you don’t want you drop them, so they just live in the cupboard.

    And then there’s my prize, the black widow. Isn’t she lovely? Oh, wait, sorry, wrong song.

    The one I have now, that has taken me decades to refine, is 1 liter - not too large, so it’s easy to carry around, but enough so a couple of refills a day are enough. It has a little handle to facilitate carrying. It’s metal, and robust. It’s vacuum insulated, so it keeps ice water cold all night. And it has a little sippy spout with a sprung button orifice so that when I knock it over it doesn’t leak. It’s the perfect water bottle, and it took me a couple decades of trial and error to refine my requirements for a water bottle: the size, the mechanism, the material.

    A water bottle that meets all of your specific use case needs really is wonderful; it’s a pleasure to use, is convenient, and by its nature encourages you to hydrate. Honestly, it’s one is those weirdly and unexpectedly useful things that you’d never expect to have as big an impact as it does, that you find yourself using more than any other single gadget you own.

    • Fifrok@discuss.tchncs.de
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      2 days ago

      Since you have so many plastic water bottles, I’m gonna ask you, a week ago I didn’t wash my bottle right away after mixing a protein shake in it (I left it for 5 hours) and now it smells foul. And no matter how many times I wash it, the smell won’t go away. Is there something that would help?

      • Maybe! There’s a product that’s like alka-selzer for bottles. It works well for metal; I don’t know about plastic.

        However, if it were me, I’d start with putting some baking soda in it and add some vinegar. That stuff will clean clogged drains, and I don’t think it’ll harm plastic. Vinegar is sold in plastic bottles, and maybe the baking soda interaction would damage it but I doubt it.

        If you don’t want to take that risk, just try vinegar. It’s a pretty good cleanser all by itself.

        Good luck!