THE VIDEO SHELF · shade balls reservoir
Why Are 96,000,000 Black Balls on This Reservoir?
Veritasium rides a boat across the Los Angeles reservoir covered in 96 million black plastic balls. He explains why they were really introduced, which was not primarily to reduce evaporation.
Why HN readers recommended it
Referenced as the explanation of shade balls and used in discussions of evaporation and floating covers.
This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.
Video & recommendation details
- Creator / channel
- Veritasium
- Topic
- shade balls reservoir
- Format
- explainer
- Level
- general
- HN recommenders in dataset
- 2
- HN mentions in dataset
- 6
- Recommendation years in dataset
- 2019–2025
These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.
From the original HN conversations
Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.
In a sort of related/inverse vein, I thought the engineering at play here was pretty interesting. 96 million shade balls on a public water supply reservoir: [VIDEO]
el_benhameen on Hacker News · 2019-05
In A Norwegian town built a giant mirror to deflect the sun (2017)[VIDEO] Veritasium video about Los Angeles' reservoir black spheres project. They used black because - The goal was light-blocking more than anything else; black worked best - The black pigment held up to the environment (especially UV degradation) better than anything else they tried I …
Tyrannosaur on Hacker News · 2022-11
In Floating solar panels that track the Sun
Summaries, classifications and recommendation records are from the HackerTube source dataset. Read about this library and its limitations.