This might be common knowledge, but I discovered a couple of small details this morning that will hopefully help me keep my shipping cost down.
I scrap in small quantities and ship out of state via FedEx Ground 100-200lbs of material at a time. So here's what I found out:
- Density of material in boxes that I have shipped has been surprisingly consistent at about 0.01 lb/in^3. I got this number by dividing shipping weight of my boxes by their dimensions.
- Using this density estimate, I got a quote from FedEx that showed that shipping two 60 lb boxes is almost $20 cheaper (for the destination ZIP that I used) than shipping one 120 lb box.
I am curious if having more of smaller boxes is cheaper still. I suspect that it's not if boxes get too small, but I did not go through the exercise to figure out at what point that happens.
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