Month: January 2014

10:30 – Cold weather has moved back into the area. The high today is forecast to be 36F (20C) lower than yesterday’s high. There’s also a winter weather advisory out, with 1″ to 3″ of snow expected starting this afternoon and into the evening.

We shipped half a dozen kits yesterday, including three in one box to a Canadian customer. That’s the first time I’ve ever used a Regional Rate Box C. That box is next to useless for domestic shipping. It’s about three times the volume of the Regional Rate Box B that we use for most kits, but postage for the C box is at the 17-pound rate, versus the 4-pound rate for the B box. But the C box is also usable for international shipping, and is large enough to fit three kits.

I’m building more kits today, which is the story of my life recently.

09:53 – We have two chemistry kits left in stock, and two orders for chemistry kits came in overnight. Fortunately, we have all the components needed to build another 14 quickly, so that’ll be the first priority today after we get outstanding orders shipped. Then I need to assemble another couple dozen biology kits and build another two or three dozen subassemblies for chemistry kits.

Postage rates go up today. I haven’t looked at them in detail, but it looks like our average shipping cost will increase by about 5%. I’ve taken a quick look at the 2014 price lists for our major vendors, and it looks like the components we use a lot of will increase by 3% to 6%, with an average around 4.5%. That excludes chemicals, most of which show significant price increases every year. I’ll have to do some detailed calcuations, but it looks like our 2014 kit prices will increase by an average of maybe 5%.

Barbara labeled about 800 bottles yesterday afternoon. She probably would have gone over 1,000 except that I ran out of labels for the bottles. But, using our patented AIT (almost-in-time) inventory management system, I have another 7,500 bottle labels due to arrive today. Not to mention empty bottles. We’re down to only a couple thousand in inventory, but I have several more cases due to arrive this week.

10:34 – As it turns out, we won’t be using that U-Line packing foam I mentioned yesterday. I called U-Line to ask about shipping cost for the bundle of twelve 6″x2000′ rolls. The product itself costs only $26 for 12,000 square feet. The problem is that it has to be shipped by motor freight, which adds nearly $100 to the final price. The U-Line guy suggested an alternative, a single 12″x1,200′ roll, which is UPS-able. The problem with that is that it costs $47 per roll, not counting the UPS shipping charges, which’d probabably be around $30/roll. So, I could get 12,000 square feet for something over $100 delivered, or 1,200 square feet–one tenth as much–for around $75 delivered. What a deal.

So I’m going to go the low-tech route. USPS specifies that “Sufficient absorbent material that will not react chemically with the hazardous material must fully surround each inner receptacle and be capable of absorbing the entire liquid contents of the inner receptacle(s) in case of leakage.” For all of the regulated chemicals we ship other than sulfuric acid, paper towels meet that criterion. So we’ll just use paper towels to pad everything other than sulfuric acid, for which we’ll use thin bubble-wrap. I don’t even have to buy the bubble-wrap. We get plenty of it in incoming shipments.

08:36 – Winter is back in Winston-Salem, or at least the cold weather. We haven’t gotten any frozen precipitation and none is in the forecast. Last night, though, the wind chill was supposed to be -4F (-20C), and the next three days are to have highs around freezing and lows in the 10F to 20F range.

One thing about this business is that we go through bottles by the thousands. The number per kit varies by kit type, but typically when we build a batch of 30 kits that accounts for a thousand or so bottles. So we generally order several cases at a time, with one case being anything from 1,100 to 1,650 bottles, depending on size.

Our current kits use mostly 15 mL and 30 mL PE cylinders and 30 mL PE wide-mouths, with an occasional 125 mL PP cylinder and 30 mL amber glass. When we start shipping the advanced chemistry kit that mix will change to include a lot more of the 30 mL glass bottles, which are needed for chemicals like concentrated acetic, hydrochloric, nitric, and sulfuric acids, 30% ammonia and hydrogen peroxide, and so on. There’ll probably be a dozen or more glass bottles in that kit, which brings up the problem of breakage during shipping. There’s really no alternative to wrapping each bottle in foam padding. I think this is what we’re going to use, one 6×12″ sheet per bottle. The foam is only 1/32″ thick, but rolling each bottle up in one sheet and taping it should provide enough foam thickness to protect against breakage.