"bob" > wrote in message
> I'll weigh in on this. I think your getting extremely misleading
> advise.
Experience is not getting advice. Did you mean giving advice?

>I have VC tanks also and they're "a dream" to use. DON'T rely
> on gas to keep the oxygen off the wine if you can physically reduce
> it. VC tanks if used right do the job as good if not better than any
> container I've used. You do have to watch the air at the beginning
> just to make sure it's set up correctly BUT once you connect all the
> fittings snuggly you shouldn't have a problem.

My experience isn't with small home versions it's full sized industrial
tanks 22 feet high and upto 10 feet in diameter. The prefered method was
always a solid tank filled to capacity; the floating lids tanks were more
show items for the tour groups than primary use tanks.
Where I worked the tank lids are steel, bolt clamped to the steel tank with
an inch thick rubber gasket. The head space-if existing- was always purged
with N2/CO2 through a gas fitting and bleeder valve.

> As far as the cover
> being too heavy, it's not the cover, there should be multiple "hooks
> on the lid and ALL the hooks should be supported by ropes. If there is
> 1 rope for a big lid then either the lid was manufactured wrong or
> someone forgot to attach a rope to all the hooks. It doesn't take long
> to take all the ropes and make them into a same length basket with 1
> rope coming up from there to attach to the ceiling if that needs to be
> done.
A 10 foot diameter lid made of stainless steel quite massive and the four
point attachment system used close to 200 linear feet of rope to suport one
lid.
You could have used a few less ropes but the redunancy is to prevent having
to lift several hundred pounds of steel lid off the bottom of a full tank.
Come to think of one of the smaller 7000 litre tanks did suffer this fate
during the first year of setting up the tanks. Moral of the storey: unless
the ropes are tied off securley don't answer your cell phone.
To raise of lower a lid you still needed several people or a winch. Not once
did a tank lid pull cleanly after it had been sitting on a tank. The rubber
sticks to the steel surface too well.