Bob,
Here is our sand bottle experience and right up front I will tell you a vocal minority hate it.
Like all the other lemmings
about fifteen years ago we ordered our golf carts with sand buckets and placed them on our carts. Some people have been excellent about filling divots when they played but many would over fill divots and dull mower blades and many never bothered to fill divots at all. Some members did not feel it was their "job" to do this
but when I heard that I pretty much ignored anything else they had to say
On days of cart path only almost no one bothered carrying the sand out to the fairway (I am a fully private club so this is member behaviour).
Also, as a player I hated sand filled divots--Assuming I wasn't in a divot the depth of a shallow grave I prefer being on bare dirt in a divot to a "micro-bunker" anyway.
One of the biggest headaches was about sand containers not filled properly, sand bins on the course needing replacement, and of course complaints that the group in front wasn't filling divots. I analyzed the cost of the sand containers on each cart and the cost of numerous large sand bins on the course that held extra sand for re-fills. Few people re-filled their containers but the re-fill containers had to be tended to a lot--if they were off to the side of a path they would get hit by carts. If they were on the grass, unless you could move them every day, you had dead circles everywhere.
The real cost was removing every sand funnel from every cart at night, filling or topping them off, stacking the now filled funnel on a shelf and then having the morning guys re-loading each funnel on each cart as it is pulled out. Unless we did this carts could go out with empty sand funnels and that would be a source of complaints (and rightfully so). Also we built (or you could buy) extra stands where golfers could replace empty funnels with new ones. Again this is more time and yet another tiny area to "manage" and it just wasn't worth the headaches at the end of the day especially when I estimated that at best, 10-25% of the membership made a habit of using the funnels themselves.
The new system has the club filling all the divots in the fairway and on the par three tees. I know I am filling more divots and filling them correctly. I can also send the kids to problem areas, low spots, fairway landing areas where people lay up a bunch, etc. At a recent meeting it was absolutely given that the new system puts out more sand. The cost is three minimum wage teenagers three days a week for three hour shifts. Usually one kid can take a carryall full of sand and finish one nine from 4-7 PM. Two days later the next nine is done and the last shift will take care of all the par threes and any "problem spots". It is about 10 hours a week @$7.50. These after school kids have done a great job. The biggest obstacle is that some of the members feel like they should do something with the divots.
The new system really does work better but each club may have a different experience.l