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["WILLIAM JONES" <billj AT harborside.com>]

Here's the cool part.  The bottles are just trash, and so can most of the 
connectors be trash also.  The pressures involved are so low that it's quite 
easy to make connectors and stoppers from used wine corks, drinking straws, 
and sealing wax from old candles, or maybe even just tallow.
Say, does anyone remember a brief ad from the 60s in which they showed 
"university" research being carried out into solar-powered heat engines?  
Mainly I remember seeing big expensive glass bell jars roasting in the sun.  
Can you imagine how much that must have costed?  Yet anyone could see that 
most of the sunlight was just passing through the bottle without having any 
effect.  Much more recently they did the exact same stoogy thing on 
Mythbusters, after which they declared that solar-powered heat engines are 
impossible.  Like maybe at least try painting the far side of the bottles 
black.  Duh!
Most of it can be made of trash, it's true, but the one thing that has to be 
fairly nice are the bladder floats.  There's a good way to do it.  Make a 
protective cage for the flow by say, weaving twigs into an egg shape.  Place 
the float inside the hollow of the egg.  Strategically glue the bag to the 
twiggy frame in several places.  The idea is that the float bag must simply 
remain organized, whether inflated or deflated.  It could otherwise become 
twisted and fail to inflate.  Fortunately we never need more than 12 floats 
or so.  After that it's probably best to connect multiple bottles in parallel 
with straws and corks.
As cool as it all is, remember that each square meter of sunlight gives a 
maximum of 1000 watts, but we'll be lucky to get even 1% of that.  The good 
news is, when I tell you that a bottle produces a maximum of 0.2 watts, say, 
it will be 0.2 honest watts.  In other words, unlike electricity, a 0.2 x 24 
(bottles) engine will lift 4.8 pounds of water at a speed of 1 foot per sound 
(actually the watt is inherently a metric quantity, it's more like 1 Newton 
worth of water (about 1/4 pound) at a speed of 4.8 meters per second.
And we haven't even talked reflectors!