Shipping a 390-kilogram stone tub to an island with no road bridge

Three departure points, chosen by what the tub is made of

There is no central warehouse. A tub leaves from wherever it was made, and that sets both the route and the price. Stone and timber bodies go out of the Kediri workshop in Tabanan, Bali. Chillers, control panels and stainless shells go out of Cikarang in West Java. For anywhere beyond Java and Bali the two meet at Tanjung Perak in Surabaya or at Tanjung Priok and travel on in a single container.

For a mixed order — a terrazzo shell from Bali and a chiller from Java going to one address in Makassar — we consolidate in Surabaya and send it as one shipment. That adds three or four days, takes about Rp 3.2 million off handling, and removes the risk of half an order arriving first.

How long it really takes, island by island

The last column is the one that matters: time from deposit to a finished cold test, not time in transit. These figures come out of our own shipping records and already include 10 to 14 days of production for a standard shell.

Crates we build ourselves

We stopped using third-party packing in 2023, after a terrazzo body cracked along a lower rib on its way to Manado. Since then every crate is built in Cikarang from 3 by 7 centimetre meranti with three cross ribs, and the tub sits on 40-millimetre PE foam cut to the shape of its own body rather than simply wedged in place. Shock and tilt indicators go on every crate, and they are not decoration: if one has changed colour when the crate is opened, the insurance claim is filed that day with the evidence already complete, and you never have to argue with anybody.

Insurance, photographs and where responsibility sits

Every shipment is insured all-risk at invoice value and the premium is already inside the freight figure. But insurance only returns money, and what you actually want is a tub standing and cold. So our responsibility does not stop at the destination port: until the unit is installed and the water reaches the promised temperature, any problem is ours.

• The crate is photographed closed in the workshop, loaded at the origin port, unloaded at the destination port and opened at your site. Four sets, all sent to you.
• Container number and sailing schedule are forwarded as soon as they are issued, so you can track it yourself.
• If a body cracks in transit we remake it and ship it again. That averages 18 extra days and it is not your cost.
• What is not ours: weather, and sailings moved by the shipping line. We tell you the same day and move the technician's flights rather than leaving you without news.

Buying before you arrive in the country

A good number of our English-speaking orders are placed by people who are not yet in Indonesia, often for a villa still being finished. It works on three conditions. Someone local must be able to receive the crate, because a container cannot wait at a port. The site has to be genuinely ready, or we store the tub free of charge in the workshop for up to 60 days rather than letting it sit in the rain on your plot. And payment stays on the same terms as everyone else — 40 per cent after the drawings are approved, 40 per cent when the shell is ground and 20 per cent after the on-site cold test — so the last instalment falls due after the water is cold, whether you are standing next to it or watching the video. The full payment structure is on the pricing page.

What the Rp 7.5-22 million pays for

This is not a freight margin. It is cost passed through, and the breakdown appears in your quotation so that you can check it line by line.

The two hardest routes we run

Gili Trawangan has no cars at all. From Lombok the crate crosses on a wooden boat and is pulled from the jetty to the site by cidomo. So every tub for the Gilis is designed modular from the drawing stage: no module above 120 kilograms, all of them liftable by four people without equipment. The body is assembled, grouted and ground on site, adding two working days, and the total from deposit to cold test is 28 days — the second longest in our network. The longest is Papua. A container to Jayapura via Makassar spends 10 to 14 days at sea and the whole job runs 35 days, which is why we put a year of consumables in the same crate: relay, start capacitor, temperature sensor, two filter cartridges and a spare pump seal. Nine faults in ten can then be cleared by a local electrician on a video call, and that is the only honest way to sell refrigeration 3,700 kilometres from the workshop.