SB Plant Invigorator Retail vs Professional products...

[Carl]

Does anyone else feel they've been cheated when they compare the retail product and the trade product? I've been looking at the manual (see link below) and it shows that a 500ml retail concentrate bottle will cost you around £16 and only make 50L of diluted spray (32p per a litre) yet the trade product will cost you £39 for 1000ml but it will make up 500L! (8p per a litre)

That's a heck of a difference

Manual ---> http://www.fargro.co.uk/content/product ... l_0815.pdf

[Bill]

Not uncommon Carl, needed some peel rivets to do a repair on the caravan. A retail pack of 5 is minimum £1.50 (over £3 on Amazon) 30p each, a trade pack of a 100 including delivery £7.50, 7.5p each!

Bill

[DaveW]

There is a certain element of saving in packaging I suppose Carl. The number of smaller bottles to contain it cost more than one larger one to make, plus possibly more time to fill and room to transport. However certainly not the difference in trade price that usually occurs.

Then again there are often unwarranted excessive trade discounts. A garage owner friend of mine told me many years ago he got a two thirds trade discount on some vehicle parts compared to the full price the man in the street was being charged for them. Whereas a ten per cent discount was more usual in my own old trade, the building trade. Another friend who worked for a local chemical firm told me how little their maintenance department paid for ball races compared to the normal retail price you or I would pay. Retail prices often subsidise trade prices.

[Keith H]

As others have said it has happened this way for years. I used to work for a photographic wholesales which had a trade counter I could sell five cases of Ektapro or Fujipress (35mm x 100 rolls per case) over the phone in less time than an amateur would take to buy one TMax 400 and a couple of rolls of Ektacolor at full list price.

The cost of sale for a retail pack is always much higher than a bulk sale in any trade.

[iann]

Or buy ready to use, 500ml pre-mixed for £6.99. Take your choice. You might consider that terrible value for money, but why spend nearly forty pounds if you only need a small amount?

There's also a 25l concentrate, makes 5,000 gallons. Fantastic value for money or a waste of money?

[DaveW]

One of the problems with insecticides I find now is the cheaper concentrates you used to dilute yourself seem to be getting rarer in favour of mixtures diluted ready to use. What that means is you are paying for a container that is more than half full of water sold to you at dearer chemical prices!

[Mike P]

On a more prosaic note - does it actually work against spider mites the current bane of my greenhouses? Nothing in that leaflet seems to give the active ingredients....

[Carl]

On a more prosaic note - does it actually work against spider mites the current bane of my greenhouses? Nothing in that leaflet seems to give the active ingredients....

There is no active ingredient as such although I believe it's given on the data sheet as Urea... it's a physical pesticide in the sense that it suffocates the insects.

It's a mixture of foliar feed and SLES (sodium lauryl ether sulfate) AKA. detergent.

however I find it's actually much more effective than using fairy (which it smells suspiciously similar to...) so I wonder if it may also contain plant oils as well to help suffocate insects.

[Mike P]

I recently tried neem oil but found it damaged the plants almost as much as the spider mites so I wondered if this was worth trying.

[Terry S.]

To the best of my knowledge there are not any chemicals currently and legally available to the amateur that will kill red spider. Therefore we are forced to rely on products such as SB which kill by physical means. SB does destroy red spider but is contact only and has no systemic effect. Furthermore, it does not kill the eggs of mite and insect pests, therefore frequent retreatment is necessary. I have not observed any damage to plants from the use of SB and it is also safe for the gardener.