Shipping heat packs duds

[JPK]

Hi,
I have been using the Uniheat multi-purpose 40 hour heat packs when shipping corals for years now, and I never had an issue with them.

Recently I bought two of the 5 packs from Amazon. The first pack had 4 that worked and 1 was a dud, in the second pack the first 3 I tried were duds, I have not opened the other 2. Luckily I had some left over from a previous order and those worked for me.

Looking at the Amazon reviews and filtering by recent, many of the reviews said the packs they received were all duds. Just for background, when shipping I open the packs and gently shake them occasionally 30 min prior to needing to pack them up. using a temp gun, the packs never exceeded 73-75 degrees even after 4-5 hours of being exposed to air. The working pack was 90 degrees in about 15 mins with the gun. The dud packs had 2026 expiration dates

Has anyone else had issues with the Uniheat packs or used a different brand and had success with them? Maybe there was a bad batch or I just got really unlucky.

Thanks
Jason

 

[JTP424]

I've run into this issue with typical hand warmers. Every now and then one just doesn't heat up as well as they should. With the amazon recent reviews being so negative, I would investigate another vendor option (maybe there are issues with how amazon handles from their warehouse etc) or a different brand.

 

[JPK]

I've run into this issue with typical hand warmers. Every now and then one just doesn't heat up as well as they should. With the amazon recent reviews being so negative, I would investigate another vendor option (maybe there are issues with how amazon handles from their warehouse etc) or a different brand.

Good call, I will see if I can purchase them somewhere else. Thanks for sharing your experience.

 

[Battlecorals]

Good call, I will see if I can purchase them somewhere else. Thanks for sharing your experience.

have you tried shaking them up a bit first. I had the same issue with a new box and thought maybe they were duds. But all it took was a good shake up of the stuff inside and they work fine.

 

[JPK]

Hi Adam, thanks for reaching out. Yes I do shake them. Usually what I do is shake them for about a min, put them down, get stuff together and continue to shake them again several times in between the steps I take during packing up corals, which usually occurs over a 20 - 30 minute period period depending on how many boxes I am packing. I would say they get about 2-3 mins of continuous shaking during that time frame. For the ones that wouldn’t fire, they probably got at least 10 mins of panic shaking. I just received a 10 pack I ordered through a different source, hopefully they do better.