Frozen soda bottles to chill

I wanted to post my method of chilling to see if anyone else does the same thing or maybe to give some ideas to people. What I do is take empty soda bottles (any size works but the bigger the better) rinse them out good and remove the labes. You need to remove the labels to properly sanitze the bottles! Then I fill each one with some table salt and water and cap (don't overfill and crack them). Throw them in the fridge a few day before you brew to make sure they freeze (salt water has a lower freezing point ). Once the boil is over I pull my bottles out spray them with starsan and drop them in. Let them drop the temperature of the wort and add your yeast.

I try to have a good bit of bottles on hand to meet my cooling needs. Once they are melted rinse off the wort and throw them back in the freezer. You can used the bottles as long as there are no scratches. There are some down sides to this method (risk of infection, space in a freezer, drinking soda and not beer, ect) but it works for me and maybe even you.

I'd be worried that dropping plastic into a solution that was just boiling a few seconds ago would cause off flavors to cook off the plastic. You don't have any problems with the plastic melting or any of the components of plastic imparting flavor?

I do the same thing, but put my BK in a container of water with frozen water bottles to cool the resevoir while I use the immersion chiller in the wort.

No plastic flavor as of yet and no melting. But I can see how the fear of a plastic taste would scare people away. Also the reason I do this is I have no wort chiller yet and carrying hot wort from one end of the house to the other, over carpet, is risky (SWMBO would kill me if spilled some on the carpet).

What if you used gatorade bottles? The two advantages I see are:
Gatorade is hot filled, so you should have less of a worry about leaching plastic when it is heated.
Because it is hot filled, gatorade has the panels on the side so that they can suck in without collapsing the bottle. This will give you something to expand so that they bottles don't explode.

Yea that would work.

I did that with my last lager. I put in a couple frozen 2L bottles after it was to 80F. Still did not get it as cold as I would have liked. I think I'll have to try a pre-chiller.