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Harlan Teklad Bedding

wcrisp

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Cavy Slave
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Jul 16, 2004
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Hi everyone, this is my first posting at CavyCages... though I've been lurking on the forum for some time.

I've been looking for a way to save money on bedding for my piggies... I've been buying them CareFresh Ultra from PetSmart at 30 dollars a bag, and I change their cage about once a week. I'm sure you can see this can get expensive real fast.

So I searched around on the Internet for a way to get CareFresh bedding more cheaply, and I came across Kim's Ark Rat Rescue through this forum or one of its cousins. (broken link removed)

Anyway, Kim's Ark sells Harlan Teklad bedding called TekFresh at 19 dollars a bag plus shipping. This is cheaper but still pretty expensive, so I kept looking, and decided to call Harlan Teklad myself to see if I could buy direct.
(broken link removed)

Turns out you can, but the minimum order is 350 dollars, and the shipping cost for that order is 120. Pretty amazing huh? See normally Harlan Teklad only sells to big labs and stuff, so to make it worth their while they set this really high minimum order... So what do you get for all this money? About 40 bags of bedding (a whole pallet), which breaks down to about 12 dollars a bag. Cost seems better when you look at it like that... 12 dollars a week vs. 30 dollars a week, plus I don't ever have to step foot in PetSmart again!

Thought you all might like to know... think I'm going to make a purchase next week, when I get my bonus. I'll let you know how it goes.

Till then,
-Will
 

wcrisp

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Cavy Slave
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Follow-up => Harlan Teklad Bedding

Hi all,
Just thought I would follow-up with an update to my original post... so I ordered the bedding from Harlan-Teklad, 40 bags of TekFresh; Total cost 405 dollars. This breaks down like this:

365 - Pallet of bedding (shipping included @ 9.13 per bag)
30 - Delivery handling charge (more about this later)
10 - Gas for my friends truck
-------
405 - Total (adjusted cost 10.13 per bag)

I had to get the bedding delivered somewhere nearby with a loading dock/fork lift, and since I don't have either of these at my house (go figure!)... I had to go find one. So I asked the local feed & seed store if they would accept delivery and they said sure... I asked the owner how much he wanted for his services and he said "a few dollars...", so I gave him 30... maybe overly generous, but when you figure it would have cost over 200 dollars to get this shipped direct to my house, its not so bad. Then I borrowed a friend's truck, into which the pallet fit neatly in the truck bed, and took the bedding home... (hmm, a bed full of bedding... ) And I put 10 dollars of gas in the tank for his trouble. I'm storing most of the bedding in the attic and keeping 4 bags of bedding near the cage at a time

So why did I do all this? A number of reasons:

- quality; I think this type of bedding is one of the best around
- ease of cage cleaning; changing the cage is simply a matter of scooping up the old bedding, and dumping a new bag of bedding. very easy.
- save time; don't have to stop at the petstore anymore
- save money from buying in bulk and at cost! I figure I'll save about 400 dollars over 40 bags of bedding compared to regular CareFresh which retails for 18 dollars a bag plus tax, and about 800 dollars compared to White CareFresh which retails for 30 dollars a bag. (which is what I used to buy)

Certainly this is not for everyone, but I thought some of you might benefit from this info, in case you wanted to do something similar for your pigs. That's one thing this forum is for is sharing our GP experiences, so happy pigging everyone!

-Will
 

Piglet

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oh my word! You went to so much trouble! Wow, well good luck with it and welcome to the forums!
 
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