Hi
After reading this very interesting article in this forum
http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1328825
I decided to ask on peoples opinions why our heatpacks are virtually emitting no heat after 18 hours in transit, we use the uniheat 30 hour heatpacks.
Our shop recently ventured into the online sales market and it has been very successful sending fish all round the summer and autumn with 99% success rate.
We are in the UK and recently the temperature has dropped into the zero to -2 range overnight, the fish are never in transit more than 18-20 hours.
During this cold snap we have experienced big problems with heat packs being cold emitting no heat when they arrive at the customers doors, needless to say fish are in distress and some have died, we put it down to lack of oxygen for the heatpacks so we put holes in the poly lids about 5mm in width behind the heatpacks taped to the lids, with cardboard box over the poly box but not over the holes, they still arrive with cold heatpacks.
Added pictures of our two main poly boxes we use.
We line the boxes with newspaper, cover the bags with newspaper and put poly boxes in a cardboard outer, then we use two heatpacks taped to lid after activating them for about 1 hour, they are blasting out the heat when box is sealed.
Only two things I can think of are if the boxes are too thin at about 1.5cm, or the atmosphere we pack in is too hot as we space heat our fish shop so it is tropical conditions and may lack oxygen for the boxes?
Clearly we will never ship in temperatures like they are now at about -2/-6 everynight, but when it is zero or above at night we would like to send fish and at the moment can not do so confidently.
Any ideas why they fail would be great as we dont want to stop shipping all winter.
Thanks
After reading this very interesting article in this forum
http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1328825
I decided to ask on peoples opinions why our heatpacks are virtually emitting no heat after 18 hours in transit, we use the uniheat 30 hour heatpacks.
Our shop recently ventured into the online sales market and it has been very successful sending fish all round the summer and autumn with 99% success rate.
We are in the UK and recently the temperature has dropped into the zero to -2 range overnight, the fish are never in transit more than 18-20 hours.
During this cold snap we have experienced big problems with heat packs being cold emitting no heat when they arrive at the customers doors, needless to say fish are in distress and some have died, we put it down to lack of oxygen for the heatpacks so we put holes in the poly lids about 5mm in width behind the heatpacks taped to the lids, with cardboard box over the poly box but not over the holes, they still arrive with cold heatpacks.
Added pictures of our two main poly boxes we use.
We line the boxes with newspaper, cover the bags with newspaper and put poly boxes in a cardboard outer, then we use two heatpacks taped to lid after activating them for about 1 hour, they are blasting out the heat when box is sealed.
Only two things I can think of are if the boxes are too thin at about 1.5cm, or the atmosphere we pack in is too hot as we space heat our fish shop so it is tropical conditions and may lack oxygen for the boxes?
Clearly we will never ship in temperatures like they are now at about -2/-6 everynight, but when it is zero or above at night we would like to send fish and at the moment can not do so confidently.
Any ideas why they fail would be great as we dont want to stop shipping all winter.
Thanks
