Abba Patio Offset Umbrella Base

It took me AND one other person (plus yet another to give the second person a break) to fill these four weights with sand and water. It is VERY SLOW going. Plan on at least an hour with two people -- I'm not even sure it's possible with only one person; this does not include the time to go buy the sand and a decent funnel. The funnel they sent me is junk and fell apart about 5 minutes into the operation.) It is possible that a different type of sand would work better -- at minimum make sure it is super-dry and try to get the smallest-grained sand you can find. One reviewer mentioned Quikrete 1962-51 (a medium-grain), so maybe that would work, but my local big-box hardware store did not have it in stock, so I bought sand that was advertised as "good for a child's sand box". I suspect that the Quikrete would have been a better solution because I think it's a finer material; if I were to do it over again, I would try Quikrete 1961, which is there "fine grain". (Note that Quikrete makes many different products, so I suggest you call the store in advance to make sure they have this particular type of Quikrete before you drive over there; my store did not have it, though they had other types of Quikrete.) Note also that these weights *leak* (at least if you use water mixed with sand, as I did). The caps for the fill-holes are snap-on type, rather than threaded, as they should be to minimize leakage. Unless you happen to have an industrial scale handy, it is difficult to figure out exactly how much sand and water to put into each weight. Sand bags typically come in 50 pound bags, so you'll need to figure out just how much of each bag to pour at each step (and you'll need to convert to kilograms because that's what they give in the instructions). Just as an example, imagine you have a 50 pound bag of sand and you need to pour 13.2 pounds of sand out of it (6 kg, per the instructions). We used good old fashioned guessing, but maybe someone has a better solution. Last, the instructions show two "methods" of filling the weights: one with just sand and one with sand and water. There is *no* explanation of the differences between these methods or reasons to choose one over the other. If I had known what I was in for, I would have bought pre-filled weights at a local store. Now that I've got these four things filled up, it's just too much trouble to empty them to return them, so I'll live with what I got. Good luck to you!