[Failure] gel pack arrived liquid and warm in July. photos at unboxing.
CPC, July shipment, Hangzhou to here. Gel pack fully liquid and noticeably warm to the touch, box interior warm, no logger unfortunately.
Photographed everything before unpacking as usual. Powder looked normal, cake intact, no discolouration. Tested afterwards and it came back fine.
Posting it as a Failure anyway, because the packaging was clearly under-specced for the season and "the contents survived" is not the same as "the packaging worked". Their summer shipments have shown this twice now and it is a standing note on the source page.
best — the order this archive was captured in
Correct flair. Packaging failure and product failure are different events and this community should keep counting them separately — a vendor whose packaging fails and whose product survives is telling you they have got lucky with a robust molecule, not that they have solved the problem.
Logged for the summer table.
The specific failure here is almost certainly thermal mass rather than insulation. A single small pack in a large void has nothing to hold the temperature with; the pack exhausts and then the air in the box does whatever the outside is doing.
Two smaller packs plus a snugger void outperforms one bigger pack in a loose box, and it costs the same.
this is the specific engineering answer i wanted and could not articulate. the void was enormous, that is exactly what it looked like.
vendors who get this right and vendors who do not are visibly different on arrival, and it is the one quality dimension you can assess yourself with no laboratory involved at all.
which is why packaging scores are on the source pages. it is the only assessable-by-anyone metric we have.
60 shipments scored on five things. it is the most-read table i maintain and the least glamorous.
hangzhou to dublin was 9/10/9/11 across four orders for me, which is a tight lane. tight lane, thin packaging — those are independent variables. edit: and CPC is good at the first and mediocre at the second.
next order, take a logger. i will post one to you.
accepting. it is faintly absurd that community-owned loggers are how this gets measured but here we are.
Two July reports on this vendor now, both with the product testing fine afterwards. Standing summer-packaging note retained rather than escalated. That distinction matters.
- 1The specific failure here is almost certainly thermal mass rather than…5 comments in this branch · started by u/thermal_mass_tom