About a month behind where I wanted to be so far this year, but koi tanks should be running in the next few weeks. All the snow and rain we’ve had in April and early May this year kept me from building. Can’t use power tools when water is falling out of the sky. I’d hastily drag out and assemble my chop saw table whenever the weather forecast promised a few clear hours, make a little progress, just as hastily take it apart and dump it all in the laundry room again when the rain would come 30 minutes early, then shop vac the wood dust and plastic shavings off the patio while hunched over the vac motor to keep it dry. Took me as long to think of a way around it – a pop-up canopy to work under – as the weather delays lasted. I think it’s rained twice since I bought the damn thing. I guess the shade has been nice.
Also, took me close to a week to work through The Mystery of The Missing Lava Rock. Lava rock doesn’t work as well as expanded clay pellets as an aquaponic grow media, but it works pretty well and is way way cheaper. I probably could have gotten all the lava rock I needed from a landscaping supplies vendor for 300$, vs the 1660$ Amazon price for the expanded clay beads I’d need for the season. But nobody, not a single landscaping supplies place in the Denver Metro, had any. I searched in a full hour circle. Finally I lost my cool on the phone with one of the phone reps and when he said “No, we won’t have any this year,” I shouted “WHY THOUGH?” Then I promptly apologized for my tone and promised I wasn’t mad at him, just that I’d been searching for lava rock for a week and really thought that it was one of the most popular decorative rocks ever and it should be everywhere and it doesn’t make any sense that I can’t find any and what the hell is going on. The guy was super nice about it, and told me that I was right on all counts, and deserved to be confused. But, he told me, the only lava rock mine in Colorado is closed for the year, and nobody wants to ship lava rock in from farther because of the increased shipping costs. He said the only place he knew that had any were the 0.5 cu ft (3.74 gallons if you’re interested) bags at Home Depot/Lowes. Indeed they had them, but the mark up on those tiny bags is crazy, and I would have had to buy 128 of them, way more than any store has. The total price would be about 1200$ and I wouldn’t have it all until the middle of June. For the quality loss compared to clay beads, and delay, the cost savings weren’t worth it.
I searched lava rock wholesale operations all across the country, and while I found some, the shipping prices were indeed extreme, especially on the volume I need – 400 gallons. It’s too little for true bulk rates, which come by the truckload, but still a large volume and weight. In the end I couldn’t find any way to buy wholesale lava rock for less than the 1660$ price tag on the clay balls, and admitted defeat.
Well, I still needed 400 gallons of grow media, and the bags of clay beads on Amazon are 6.6 gallons each. Surely I could find a better way to order the clay beads in bulk, right? Wrong again. Nobody sells it by the shovel full, because apparently most people use these things as a drainage layer in the bottom of plant pots, and the most popular volume to buy is a one gallon bag. Most people use, like, 30 clay balls, not 30,000. I found the same 6.6 gallon bags on a few gardening supplies wholesale websites, which could shave off a few hundred dollars from the total, but these poor Not Amazon businesses had to charge for shipping, like regular people. Shipping the clay balls from these companies came out to 1100$, vastly outweighing the savings on the item price.
So, begrudgingly, I once again bought the majority of my total supply costs for the year on Amazon, at regular Amazon retail price. Because somehow that’s the cheapest way to do things, even at small business scale. And because of this strange confluence of events, I got to tack on 1300$ to my expenses, and lost nearly a week of work hours to figuring my way through The Mystery of the Missing Lava Rock.