Questions and Troubleshooting

Questions:

• Where are you located:  Algae Research and Supply is located in San Diego California.  
• When will my order ship:  We will generally ship on the business day after you order.  Larger or complex orders may take a bit longer.
• Can I delay shipping?  Yes, but please let us know via email so that we can amend the work order that we send to shipping.  We often do this for schools so that they can pay for things that they will need later in the semester.
• Do you take Purchase Orders? Yes, as long as your organization passes our credit check.  Most schools are OK.
• It's winter, can I still get algae:   Yes!  All of our cultures have a small amount of salts dissolved in the media.  This means there will be a little of a freezing point depression.  Despite this, try and get your cultures indoor as soon as possible.  Let them warm up slowly and put them into the correct media where they will flourish.  If they are rock-solid frozen, there can still be hope.  If they are still green after a few days, they are in a lag-phase, meaning that they need some time to get used to the new environment.   Algae have been on the earth for over 4 billion years with countless ice ages, they are used to abuse!
• Warm weather:  Keep your algae under 104F.  Water has a great heat capacity, if you live in a ridiculously hot place, where it is >104F in the shade all day, you should consider moving.  If you can not, and still want algae, simply order appropriately so that you can bring the algae indoors soon after delivery.  FYI- its not just the heat,  its light and heat.  The proteins inside the cells begin to denature above ~104F, but if light is involved, the physics of the photosynthetic pigments mean that they MUST catch energy and pass it down the electron transport chain causing damage to the entire photosynthetic pathway.  So the cells try to save themselves, by destroying their pigments, and the culture turns orange.  Recovery is hard after that, and you may want to start with a new culture.  
• Overseas shipping:  This is possible, but we have to do some special adjustments to the culture to slow down the metabolic processes for the algae, or else they will literally suffocate during transit.  We do have to charge for faster shipping.  

• For shipping rates, please use our website to determine the cost.  If it does not show up as deliverable on our website, we will be unable to ship to you.  What you see as the search results is exactly what we seel.