Consumers care about 'plug and play' to a sometimes confusing degree. I've heard numerous stories about products made objectively worse to make it more appealing to consumers--pretty, but tasteless tomatoes, apples, and other produce are one example. I heard (a possibly apocryphal) story that bottled smoothie companies add questionable things to keep smoothies suspended because consumers prefer not to shake their drink before consuming.
I wouldn't be surprised if this was investigated internally at multiple companies, but decided consumers wouldn't like the extra steps. I've also had many apartments explicitly disallow containers of liquids larger than a few gallons (the obvious case is fish tanks) because of insurance and liability reasons.
I hope this is successful and takes off...but I can see still see it being rejected by consumers. Maybe these are the kinds of things where a regulation is the best course forward?
Plug and play? A washing machine already needs water input, it would be an interesting hack to pipe up the internals so that during the first run, it will first fill the ballast container, and only after that's full will the rest of the water be used for normal washing. And somehow make it so that the ballast container can be sealed off when it's full, maybe a tiny sliding door which will rise with the water, and when it's high enough, a magnet above it will pull it and seal the container shut.
And if you want to transport it, just add a mechanism that can release all the water... and also open that door.
I wouldn't be surprised if this was investigated internally at multiple companies, but decided consumers wouldn't like the extra steps. I've also had many apartments explicitly disallow containers of liquids larger than a few gallons (the obvious case is fish tanks) because of insurance and liability reasons.
I hope this is successful and takes off...but I can see still see it being rejected by consumers. Maybe these are the kinds of things where a regulation is the best course forward?