MISSION STATEMENT
Co Authored by Misti King Updated 1/21/12

We strive to sell products and provide information in this manner:

(1) Quality products at a great value that we and/or our aquarium maintenance partners would use.
We often do not sell some products from companies where we find the majority of their products excellent. We do this because we or our professional maintenance partners have not found these particular products satisfactory.
A good example would be the Via Aqua 4900 and Stainless Steel Heater. The vast majority of Via Aqua heaters and especially pumps are of good quality and value, but not these.
Other companies such as API we do not sell all their products, or recommend their use for all applications the manufacturer (or others) may, so please read our extensive library of Aquatic Information (such as Aquarium Medications) if you have questions prior to use.

*An example of a product we thought was an excellent idea, but also failed in testing was the JBJ Internal UV Sterilizer (which is also sold under alternative names).

*Another example are the Hydro Sponge PRO Filters in small sizes such as the #2; while the #5 PRO is an excellent filter for the environment and flow rates for which they were designed, we have found the Hydro Sponge #2 PRO to not work as well in both flow rates and bacterial loads for the smaller tanks a #2 are designed for, thus in the end the #2 Standard out performed the #2 PRO!

(2) Testing; Even in selling many of the best quality products we can sell at competitive prices, we also realize that nothing is perfect and with many of our products such as the UV-C Bulbs, Aquarium Light Fixtures, UV Sterilizers, and many, many more we open and test to help our customers avoid the hassles of receiving defective merchandise.
This is a time consuming process that few of our competitors take the time to perform!

As well, since we test many of the products we sell, we also may make improvements based on our experience. This is to insure our customers that even with an item that can be purchased elsewhere, our customers may be getting a better product. As an example, the SunSun Canister Filter where we include a Return Elbow that we strengthen and retrofit with an outer layer of 5/8" vinyl tubing to provide the best possible product for our customer.
In fact as per the SunSun Canister Filter, we open all filters and check the parts PLUS add FREE Filter material not included by the manufacturer(including high efficiency Volcanic Rock for improved Bio Filtration)!

(3) Unique Products, that are often difficult to find elsewhere

(4) Information about many aspects of aquarium and pond care that are based on decades of experience that include our aquarium/pond maintenance partners as well as 1000s of hours of in depth research, often outside the anecdotal aquarium community.

(5) Feedback; Our policy is to provide the BEST and most ACCURATE information possible, which our decades of hands on experience and research testifies to. Because of this knowledge we do NOT allow the popular Amazon.com type feedback as we have found this to be highly inaccurate.
As an example we have seen pumps, filters, etc. given bad reviews (such as the Rena Smart Filter) based on incorrect set-up.
As well we have seen a popular Internal UV Sterilizer (Killing Machine) given good reviews in the majority of reviews, while in reality these units have mostly failed in testing after several months and more importantly these UVs cannot even perform level 1 sterilization, yet many purchase these thinking this only to later realize the problem and blame all UV Sterilizers as "only good for clarification";
How is this accurate?
So our apologies to those who disagree as to our Feedback policy, but we care more about the truth so as keep our readers fish happy and healthy.
We are more than happy to get feedback, including constructive and accurate criticism; Please see our Contact Page/Form to leave any.

(6) The lowest possible price; this means that many products we sell often are close to cost with profit margins as low $2 on some filters (even large aquarium or pond filters have small profits).
To keep our prices as low as possible, while not repeating mistakes prior to 2009 (resulting in business losses), we utilize multiple shipping methods and perform many tasks "In House" such as:
*Much of the Internet SEO & advertising
*We build many of our boxes from scratch or recycle boxes and packing material
*In house webmasters and art work
*Even long trips (1600 miles) with our own truck to pick up products (& returns); this also results in better communication and product knowledge due to time spent in face to face transactions and discussion of products (including problems).
*An extensive and constantly growing and updated information library for helping both customer and non customer alike

*Also see our Feedback Page as to how we attempt to provide the best possible customer service along with aquarium/pond keeping information that is second to none!

(7) Shopping Cart: We utilize a PayPal hosted shopping cart that accepts Credit Cards without requiring a PayPal account.
We do this for the proven safety of their encrypted shopping carts. Also this integration allows for a template where by we can provide the copious amounts of information/content unique to our website that other check button templates do not allow.
This requires a drop down menu type shopping cart that while not as simple as a single shopping cart for each item, this drop down menu cart is still one of the most popular carts for internet hosting and allows for information that the popular "separate button" cart website templates do not allow.

As well, a web designer added Quick "Jump to Cart" buttons to skip past information to our drop down menu carts; these are unique to our website and not found on most others using information/content rich web pages with drop down shopping cart menu web site templates. Despite the few persons these seem to confuse, feedback from our many forums, clients, customers has been 97% positive for these "Jump to Cart" buttons for improving our content rich but slightly less convenient drop down menu cart web pages.

As per customer requests, we have added "Pay Now" buttons to our Home Page as another way to quickly check a persons shopping (we personally do not care for this redundant feature, but again many have asked for this and thus we added this feature)

(8) Provide Customer service that responds to emails within an hour or two (often much less) during normal business hours and within a day otherwise (also often much quicker).

However we cannot accept phone questions of a technical nature for these reasons:

*The person returning this call may not be the most qualified or have time to research for the best answer.
*We also will often research questions we do not readily have an answers for. This includes contacting staff (not otherwise readily available in shop, rather working at other locations for efficiency), vendors, sister maintenance company personnel, etc. for further information.
*Phone calls are answered in office, while emails are answered from multiple locations, including after hours.
*We can provide links to our extensive library or our many trusted outside resources for further information
*We prefer a written record for a variety of reasons including teaching/training of other employees or forum members
*We are set up to operate online;
And bluntly, our business was unprofitable during the years we did not have such a policy in place as we spent much of our time in 20 minute phone calls or long email threads (as we did not refer to our extensive articles) and little managing and running our very thin profit margin business. The result was we lost money for years, of which we still are in debt for.

We hope readers understand this policy, which based on the volume of email we receive (most of which is from non customers) & 99% positive feedback; this seems to be the case.

See Also: Further Mission/Policy Information

(9) Handle In House Warranty Returns; this means time and man hours spent testing and then often replacing or occasionally repairing products, with the majority of these returns damaged by misuse or customer equipment failures (such as Blown UV Bulbs due to a customers bad ballast or moisture damage to lights).
Many of these warranty issues would not result in replacement from the manufacture without a repair/replacement charge, yet most of the time we provide this service for free other than return shipping fees.

(10) Abuse of our Help/Fraud; Unfortunately fraud is a common issue of late with customers attempting to return product purchased elsewhere, complaining about products that were not used correctly that usually were not purchased from us (such as demanding replacement parts for a filter they purchased at Walmart; yes this has actually happened!), filing claims of non receipt within a day or even hour purchase with their credit card issuer or PayPal.
Since PayPal and Credit Card issuers do little to fight fraud against merchants, we have to use in-house tools to combat this problem, this includes refusing future sales to customers who have constantly misused products, refused to pay warranty shipping, and the number one "Red Flag" is threatening or actually filing a complaint with their Credit Card issuer or PayPal. We have found that statistically 80% of these are attempts to commit fraud against us in some form or another. Due to this problem of fraud, such claims are now automatically placed in a black list for refund of any future purchase.
We ask that honest customers give us a chance to correct any problem they might have (which we usually do as such often at our loss). In fact we find based on our data most customers extend us such courtesy, but this same data has shown that those who make threats are simply attempting to defraud us and for this reason we have added this extra security measure.

FURTHER MISSION/POLICY INFORMATION:

To provide this level of service, information, price and quality, please understand we also must make our business as efficient as possible (which includes a very small advertising budget, so we must perform most of this "in house")

Many procedures we ask of our customers are not meant to make it more difficult, only to streamline our business.
The facts are most of the questions we answer (in particular Carl, including forums) are not from our customers, rather "brick & mortar" local aquarium stores & online aquarium supply business', where customer service is non existent or is often simply incorrect (examples include Dr. Foster & Smith and Pet Mountain whom Carl answers many questions for THEIR customers both here and in forums).
These can usually be answered by the articles we provide, which represent literally 1000's of hours of work.

The result of people not reading our articles prior to asking questions, resulted in an inability to keep our articles as up to date as possible, provide the best possible customer service for OUR customers, and as recently as 2009 not even provide any reasonable profit (even as of 2011 Carl still earns not much over the "poverty level". Most of his time is still spent in articles and answering questions for persons who purchase elsewhere).

The founder, Carl, puts in well over 12 hour days (often 7 days per week) that we need him to use as productively as possible. This is just one of the many reasons we have such in depth articles! We want people to read them and learn from them. If Carl is busy answering questions that are clearly posted on the web site, such as “How much does an LED cost?” he isn't able to update articles for all the sites and groups he helps host.

Another example would be sending schematics/blue prints asking that we/Carl review their “project” designs for free (such as their own filter, UV Sterilizer, aquarium, pond; basically giving free design advice for their profit). Another example would be returning an international phone call to explain a pond set-up, detail by detail, which resulted in a $13 phone bill for us to provide free advice that was otherwise 100% readily available in our Pond Care Article & UV Sterilization Article (they stated that they were too busy to read our articles, which is basically telling us our time is not as important as theirs even though we are providing free information).
We also found that even phone order requests were much more efficiently handled with fewer costly mistakes by asking for the Contact Form be filled out prior to our calling for a Credit Card number and other possible information to complete the sale (we found that between the high fees we are charged by the bank for phone order, time these take, and occasional mistakes, we were making no profit on many of these orders)

To improve efficiency we now screen phone calls and ask our customers to email us first with questions or phone orders, as this is a vastly more efficient way to handle issues such as products damaged in shipping. This does not mean we do not talk personally in phone calls, only that we attempt to resolve questions in emails where we can more readily attach links to our articles that can provide more in depth information for the person asking the question. We can then return phone calls when more personal contact is necessary

If you ask our regular customers, including the forums we sponsor such as, Everything Aquatic, (at no charge) or even the manufacturers we purchase from you will find that 99% of persons find our customer service second to none! (Such as Aquarium Supply manufacturer; “Ancient Mariner” who no longer sells their products at the largest online aquarium and pet retailer. This is due to this retailers lack of customer service for Ancient Mariner's Cleaning Machine, which is unlike our support for even others questions about products often purchased elsewhere)

Another common question we get from many persons is simply asking for prices that are clearly on web pages, and while we answer these questions, please understand if we seem "short" with persons who repeatedly ask for a price for this and a price for that from their iPhone or similar that this takes time from the day that can be used for many tasks such as our in house advertising, resulting in either us having to pay outside sources or lower sales, so please respect that we too are attempting to make a living.

Finally we should note that even as of this page update, 75% of the emails, forum questions, or phone calls we return/answer are not from customers or even future customers (as per our tracking of purchases via names, phone calls, emails).
Not that we mind answering these questions as we enjoy helping aquarium and pond keepers as well as other related issues This is why we spend literal 1000's of hours writing the most extensive aquatic information pages on the Internet and sponsor an Aquarium Forum at no charge to the members which includes 100's of volunteer hours there, often providing free products as well. We simply need to be more wise with our time as otherwise we would not be able to support our actual customers, and provide the quality products at low prices all the while providing a living for the owner and employees (the years 2005-2008 we did not manage our time as well in balancing questions & business and this resulted in red ink).

It is also noteworthy that based on both in house and outside studies/stats the 90% of our emails/phone calls that take more time (often not reading any of our published material no matter how much we attempt to ask during these emails/phone calls) represent less than 10% of our customers while these same studies/stats show that those who take the time to read our articles (which are well indexed), contact, shipping and other pages and then ask more pertinent questions generally represent the majority of our actual customers.

Our hope is that this mission statement will allow persons to understand that we care and we want to help, but please help us help you by first reading our information and then respecting the fact that we get volumes of email and phones calls and simply cannot provide the amount of time many demand (especially since most questions are from non customers).

BIOGRAPHY

EARLY HOBBY YEARS;

I will be more brief here (not all that much to say); I got my first aquarium in the late 1960's (1968 if my memory is correct when I was 9 years old). This was a Metaframe 5 gallon aquarium which is different from the all glass aquariums with silicone for construction that became more popular in the 70's forward. This aquarium had a simple "bubbler" corner filter powered by a Metaframe Air Pump. My first fish were guppies, zebra danios, Platties and white clouds.

A little over a year later I got a 10 gallon aquarium where I again used a simple corner filter, albeit larger and a more "modern" design. In this tank, I added many types of Tetras from Neons, head/tail lites, etc. Also Rasboras, Corys and my first Plecostomus (which no one warned me how large these guys could get).

In the early 70's, I purchased a 40 gallon "all glass" aquarium which had my first HOB filter; a Dynaflo (which is a much different design than current HOB filters). I continued with similar fish that I had before, just more and a little more "exotic" (such as some Buenos Aires Tetras which were exotic to me at the time). I later decided to try my hand in saltwater even though there was little good information at this time about saltwater keeping. I added an Undergravel filter, the "new" Nektonics design, which at the time was considered to be the best. (At least by persons I knew in the hobby). I added Damsels, clown fish, a Yellow Tang, a Batfish and some others that my memory fails me on. I later added a Brown Octopus which was the most interesting creature I owned as he had a neat personality.

FIRST YEARS IN PET STORE/MAINTENANCE BUSINESS

In 1977 I got a job at Archie's House of Pets, initially their original La Puente and shortly there after at the West Covina Mall store (it was called the West Covina Fashion Plaza). Danny Digiacomo was my original "boss" (he was not the owner but ran all three stores as if he was the owner) He was a good mentor and really new his stuff from a business point of view. Later, issues between Danny and the actual owner (who was not a hands on owner) resulted in him leaving as he purchased another high end Pet Store in Orange County.

I shortly there after became an assistant manager at the West Covina Store and the general manager for the fish departments.

I made a point during this time to inquire of all trade representatives, especially Aquatronics for which they had some of the most up to date information about aquarium water chemistry, treatment at the time and they later knew me personally due to my many questions and later named me the "Green Flake Man" (more later as to why).

In late 1978 I started my Aquarium maintenance business on the side while still employed at Archie' House of Pets. In early 1979, I had an employee of the Bahooka Restaurant contact me for a sick Arowana (a restaurant that would become very well known in the LA area for its many aquariums and unique Polynesian atmosphere). She had failed to cure an infection despite many attempts from others advice, however I made a house call and was able to save her prize fish and she was so happy that she told her boss (Jack) and he contacted me to set up and maintain the aquariums at the Bahooka Restaurant.
Unfortunately the West Covina location lost its lease, however this allowed to expand the Rosemead Bahooka location where I expanded their aquariums to over 100, and many were over 100 plus gallons.

This became a launching point for my business and problems at Archie's prompted me to start my own store in Hacienda Heights at the end of 1979 along with my now fiancé Tris (who I met at Archie's House of Pets).

1980s TO 2002, INCLUDING EXPERIMENTS/TRADE SHOWS

Although my Aquarium store started slow, it would soon grow and we then rented the building next door to double in size in late 1980. However it was the maintenance business that really blossomed and made our name, especially since our store was in a somewhat obscure location.

During the early years, besides the Bahooka, I picked many other well known accounts from the Lobster House, well known Doctors, attorneys, Coaster Co. (which by the 1990s would become the largest Furniture importer in North America and our largest account with multiple locations and many aquariums and ponds), and more.
I was able to work out agreements with many of my service accounts such as the Bahooka to provide 100% care and with a certain price I used these locations for many tests (as well as some breeding). My earliest tests were in fish foods (based on many ideas provided by mentors such as Aquatronics and hobbyist doctors I made friends with). This is how I earned the nickname the "Green Flake Man" by Aquatronics as I found despite the popularity of many household brand names such as Tetra Fish Foods that these food may have raised generations of fish (as many anecdotal pundits of Tetra products would say), in actual controlled tests Tetra foods did not hold up to what I called Green Flake at the time (now Spirulina 20) and other foods.
I have to admit that these ideas to perform these tests were because I LISTENED to others such as Aquatronics researchers and a representative at a trade show from Sera foods of West Germany who, at the time made this statement: "I find it interesting how popular Tetra Foods are in America while in Germany they are considered the cheap discount food", I guess excellent marketing which still persists to this day.
See my Fish Nutrition article for more along with my Spirulina Article: "Proper Fish Nutrition".
"Spirulina Algae in Fish Food"

In the late 1980s I became a good friend with Dr. Herzog, a well respected Endocrinologist in Whittier that was a long term fish hobbyist (both marine and Freshwater). I maintained an aquarium in his office and helped with his home aquarium. During this time he taught me much about what medications can and cannot do and how even in human treatment one makes an "educated guess" at best. He taught me much that contradicts to this day what many anecdotal claims about medications, bacteria and more that still persist in this hobby. (Aquatronics played a major role in my education here as well) I would read my medications article for more on this subject: "Aquarium Medications; Page 1"

During the late 1980s, I also set up many aquariums in a room of my house where I experimented and performed controlled tests of filters, medications and more.
During the 1990s, many of these tests continued and I used my aquariums along with Coaster Co (which by now had become my largest service account for both aquariums and a few 5000 gallon ponds as well) for my tests that would eventually contribute to my articles: "Aquarium Disease Prevention", UV Sterilization, "Aquarium GH, KH, pH, Calcium", and "Aquarium & Pond Redox".
These tests were conducted to try and explain why I was observing certain results with differences in care of many of my client’s aquariums/ponds. I also conducted these tests because it was simply good business for me to make as few unnecessary visits due to problem with my clients aquarium (not to mention better customer satisfaction), so figuring out a method or methods that keep fish alive with the least problems was advantageous for me.
Aquarium Disease prevention was so important and I found that employing as many steps that were part of this "prevention puzzle" would lower the amount of disease incidence and lengthen fish longevity.

During the late 1990s, when I was considering re-opening my aquarium store that I earlier had closed to satisfy my now ex-wife, Tris. (see my regular bio), I pondered using one of Marineland's pet store bio wheel systems since I had many Penguin Filters as well. However when discussing this with another colleague in the maintenance business (that I would occasionally see at Quality Marine), he questioned my reasons and quickly made me realize that I was sold on the Bio wheel for anecdotal reasons and this was the beginning of another controlled test about these popular bio filtration devices. please see this article for more: "Aquarium Answers; Do Bio Wheels work".

Many similar tests also were conducted around this time, including using Fluid Filtration, live rock crumbles for nitrate removal in Marine Aquariums, Protein Skimmers, Veggie Filters in ponds and many different filter combinations (including drilled canister filters) that often went against the popular filter system beliefs of the time.

2002 TO THE PRESENT, INCLUDING CURRENT RESEARCH AND WHAT OTHERS HAVE POINTED OUT ARE MY STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES

In 2002 I had to leave behind my aquarium maintenance business and store (which was quickly liquidated by a couple that took advantage of my situation, which mirrored my previous store situation unfortunately).
As noted in my main biography I worked at a Candy factory when I first had to move to Oregon to keep my family safe and pay off debts. This was caused by an affair and other bad influences and ran up $80,000 in debts. I later started my online Aquarium Supply and information websites, in part from inspiration of a co-worker a the Candy Factory (Rachel Owen), and later I also realized that many persons over the years that knew me during my maintenance business days wished I would put down on paper my aquarium & pond information knowledge and I utilized my website for this idea.

What I would like to point to the readers of this aquarium/professional biography is that much of my success/knowledge over the years is NOT based on my scientific brilliance or similar (yes I did do very well in school in science), but more to my use of business skills to recognize what I did and did NOT know and allow myself to learn from others and as well recognize in others where they could make up in my deficiencies. I continue to research for my articles, and I generally research OUTSIDE the Aquarium industry/hobby because I RECOGNIZE that much of the popular information is often re-posted and passed around over and over (lighting for example). I will research fish farming studies, horticultural studies, medical studies, lighting innovations, water chemistry and its effects on life in general, and many other such sites (often .edu sites).

One of my talents is that I am very good at organizing information, while at the same time I am a poor analytical thinker (I am a much better "picture" thinker). Despite the “business challenged” investors that ran the Candy Factory or others where I live now or those that believed the BS spread by the person that harmed my family, MOST who have worked with me over the years have noted that I am often open to learn and that I make up for my weaknesses with my businesses organization and similar skills.

For example, even during my stint of attempting a career change of becoming a professional pilot, that 4 VERY different flight instructors and even a very hard ass FAA examiner (for my multi-engine pilots license) noted that I was only an average pilot in my flying abilities, but that my excellent cockpit organization and recognition of my weaknesses (I was not at all cocky according to one instructor) made me an excellent pilot.
What does this have to do with fish keeping you might ask? Well a lot in my feed back over the years with my clients who stated that appreciated my honesty, integrity (I would not simply sell a product because there was a lot of money to be made or it was popular), dependability, and willingness to always learn, which quite bluntly is often very rare in the aquarium/pond industry. In fact another Mentor over the years (Reggie) at aquarium supply wholesaler that finished his business career there (after most of his decades of business in different industries) told me this: "I have never seen a more dishonest and back stabbing business than the Aquarium industry".

I am making these statements NOT to puff myself up or put others down, but to point out them I am nothing special in my general ability to glean aquarium knowledge, only that I am very good at organizing information, listening to others and testing what they say, regardless of my opinion at the time (which may be then forced to change). Even in areas of low knowledge such as specific fish species knowledge and breeding (such as the many African Cichlids), I HAVE kept many of these fish in a generic since and I have applied my tests in keeping fish alive and long term fish health to these fish with excellent results, so although I may not know the specifics of many different exotic fish I can attest to VERY good success in long term care/health (at least my many clients that have had many different aquarium service personnel before employing me have stated).

Anyway, I will close for now, that I am still learning and though some may criticize me or label be fish expert guru, in reality I am somewhere in the middle on balance and I will also point out that besides the fact that I am still learning, many of those I am learning from are younger or even with maybe only a few years experience (Suzie Q at Everything Aquatic is relatively new to the hobby, but she has taught me things I did not know). I have also learned from others at Everything Aquatic such as John Laffin (Murdock), Brenda, Barbara, Bill, Jon V, Eve, Parker, fishfever, and MANY others there alone (please forgive me if your name is left off here, even though chances are I have learned from many posts, especially questions that made me re-check my own research or expand it!!)
I will also admit that while I was flamed and treated like cr#! on many Google Groups I was on, I still learned from some of those that were rude and nasty, as I did not let that get in the way of good information.

I will add much to this biography as I think of more and have more time, so please check again (if interested that is).

SEO EXPERIENCE, WEB SITES

Besides my aquarium/pond experience, I have had to become relatively proficient in web site SEO (Search Engine Optimizations; the field of making a web site more search engine friendly) and similar website design issues. This is/was due to the fact that I first came into my aquatic information articles and commercial web site with a “Field of Dreams” attitude that if you build it, they will come. Unfortunately many even so-called SEO experts would often tell me that if I presented my articles which were VERY unique in content (as what is referred to as link bait), other sites would link to me and I would grow.
Unfortunately this was NOT true, as unlike some fields of endeavor (such as the more “happy” candy industry where I have done some limited SEO) where others happily link to sites with good content so as to give their readers many alternatives for information or products, this is/was NOT true for the Aquarium/pond industry/hobby.

After about 18 months of nothing happening I quickly realized that sites like DMOZ which at least in the Aquarium category had no interest in adding me, as they clearly preferred the same tired anecdotal sites that were vastly out of date and worse.
I have since started building MANY web sites & blogs (over three dozen), with some of these in categories such as Travel, Personal Experiences, etc. for which obtaining in bound links from good sites based on my good content was somewhat easier to perform and then link to my main web sites from these other sites.
As well I have written many separate article sites (such as UV Sterilizer Articles) that I would also point towards my important pages/article.

The difficulty is that keeping all these sites current and fresh, as well as the occasional web site issues takes an enormous amount of time, but this is unfortunately necessary, as sadly to this date (July, 2010 as of this update), since I still count less that 1/10th of 1% of my main aquatic articles and web pages in-bound links from sites other than myself, which means that my web site presence on Google, Yahoo, MSN, still relies heavily on my keeping up with this.
The one exception has been from my friend Tommy Butler who helped me build another new web page to promote my sites and has helped with optimization of this site and others to some degree with the little spare time he has.

Other help for this website has come from Steven Wright's fantastic picture skills (he really exemplifies the expression "a picture is worth a thousand words" with his picture art).
Blaine Scheidegger also contributed much in his 8 month tenure here with vast improvements to web design, layout and simply fresh ideas.
Finally, with her many talents (such as finding the many grammatical errors in Carl's writing, which is still a work in progress), and more so her positive attitude; Misti King helps everyone here deal with extreme negativity and dishonesty that is found in the aquatics hobby/industry.

Summary:
So to my readers, if I ever seem impatient with my replies to email, phone calls, etc., please understand that along with my MANY family duties and regular business issues (shipping, ordering, article updates, etc.), I have to spend much time with all these web sites with almost no help (this often equals 14 hour days).
It is also noteworthy as to emails, etc, that most are for questions that I (along with Steven and others here) that we have spent much time adding information, pictures, etc., that we attempt to point these questions to these easily found answers on our web pages, yet many will choose to re-ask questions with multiple email threads that we have already provided in depth answers to, this seems to be especially a problem with International emails. As well we now have had to add another staff person due to these volumes of emails which has had the results of lowering what I personally make from this business to close to minimum wage when my time is considered. Sadly, statistically those that ask questions that are easily answered on our web pages rarely make purchases (less than 10%); this is particularly true of questions relating to LED lights, UV Sterilization, & medications, yet these are the very subject I have copious amounts of in depth information online for.
So again please do not take it as rude when I attempt to direct any emails of these type to my online sources and then cut these emails (or phone calls) short if the asker seems to refuse to read the answers for themselves, I am simply attempting to prioritize my time and follow statistics so as to cut down on my high work load

For Carl's Personal Biography Page, please follow this link: My Biography

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