Today I wish to share a not so great experience with my purchase of Caribsea Life Rock (dry rock) branch rock.
With my new tank build, I wanted to keep two things in mind:
- I do not wish to cause any unnecessary strain on the natural environment. Thus I chose to go with dry rock versus live rock harvested from the wild.
- I wanted to create a more dynamic landscape with “sticks” rather than “chunks”. The advantage is it looks cool (at least to me), and also provide better water flow compare to chunks of rock that prevents water from properly flowing through to remove detritus.
So with that in mind I decided to go with the Caribsea limericks sold on Marine Depot. Disclaimer- This article and poor experience has nothing to do with Marine Depot as a retailer, they did their job perfectly.
I have seen and spoken to Caribsea reps at a few aquarium trade shows and they’ve captured my confident in believing that this is a good alternative to live rock harvested in the nature. And I still believe in that.
So I decided to order two boxes of 20b, total of 40lb rocks from Marine Depot website. They honestly aren’t cheap. I think regular branching Tonga rocks would have cost about $7-9/lb, and these are about $5/lb.
The order arrived in two rather large boxes. After unboxing them I think Marine Depot probably could have saved their money by simply shipping what Caribsea’s packaging was in as it would have not made much difference. But Marine Depot did a very detailed job by placing the Caribsea’s box within a large box and surrounded by fold up construction paper. The construction paper was on all of the boxes five sides except the bottom. Which I wonder if that have caused the damage.
The Caribsea box came in much smaller, about 1.5′ x 1′ x 1′ compare to Marine Depot’s 2′ x 1.5′ x 1.5′ box.
As I open the box I squealed, the rocks have been all tightly packed (really, very tightly) with a thin layer of bubble sheet between the rocks. about 80% of all the branching rocks no longer have “branches” at arrival as they have all broken off (see image below).
So I guess I did get my wish- I got a bunch of sticks and rubble rather than branches. I have phoned Marine Depot afterwards and asked whether they open the shipments from Caribsea to inspect damage upon receiving them or not. The answer is “NO”. Marine Depot have shipped me these rocks exactly how they arrived their fulfillment center from Caribsea and was never inspected.
With that I am beginning to wonder whether the rocks have already been broken up while they were all shaking and bumping around in a shipping crate on their way to the Marine Depot facility. Thus no matter how carefully Marine Depot had packaged them it would have not been of any help as the rock have already been broken.
I guess if you are considering to order these dry rocks from any online vendor, let it be Marine Depot or not, I would suggest that you wait until Caribsea do something about their initial package to pad the individual rocks better, even add more peanut between all the rocks or use foam padding. I had also provided product review to this rock and while I am OK with having to arrange them based on how they arrived, I have wished more “branched” had stayed intact.
These dry rocks seems to be more brittle than what reaches the eye. So if you don’t mind receiving a bunch of broken branches for this price then feel free to order them online. Otherwise you can also pay a higher price to personally select more “perfect” pieces at a local store.