Ilford fixer comes in 5L bottles, which you can reuse. The 5L size makes sense from the standpoint that it fills two 8-reel Paterson tanks (well, at least on the first run, after which you lose some and then you can only run one tank at a time.
On the other hand, distilled water in the U.S. comes in gallon containers. It also comes in 5L containers, but those are designed to be put on their sides with airholes poked in them to give a good flow. Air holes are terrible for chemical storage. The bottles are also very flimsy.
Now, on the contention that 3.8L U.S. gallons are difficult for people to comprehend - it's 3 x 1000ml plus 1 x 800ml in a graduated cylinder (the 15ml difference if you actually convert the units is not in any way significant to the dilution of photographic chemicals). If that's too challenging, most graduated cylinders sold for photographic use are marked in U.S. ounces, imperial ounces, and ml (I use different measures all the time depending on what chemical it is). The ability to multiply to two digits of precision may be a personal issue for some people - but diluting chemicals even in a foreign unit of measure is far less complex than recomputing development times for temperature, compensating for the reuse of developer, etc.
Now, while (whilst?) we are taking various cultures to task, perhaps someone can explain to me why - in the midst of a list of many metric measurements - Italian cookbooks often revert to the bicchiere unit of measurement, which has no precise definition? I don't imagine that is an imperial "cup" (8oz by volume) - does that mean the 200ml (6.75 oz) tumblers used in restaurants and used as small wine glasses? This actually makes a difference with pizza dough.
Dante
