As I said in my last column, after years, indeed, of trying to keep air in pressure tanks, our industry figured out that the air was being eaten by the water. What followed were numerous methods to keep the air and water separated. These I have written about in previous columns. While a great leap forward, the air and water were not totally separated in these tanks and some loss was still experienced. Then the intelligent people at the manufacturing level figured out a way to, indeed, keep the water and air totally separated and the bladder tank was born.
One of the few drawbacks of the early bladder tanks was they were small due to the fact that they were made of stainless steel, which was and is quite expensive. This limited their use to fairly small pumps with low production rates so the motor had a long run cycle and would not “start/stop” itself to an early death.