I’m not sure why some people had so many issues using this stuff, but it was really not as tricky as some of the reviewers made it seem. I bought the base and the day it went up, I quickly regretted that I’d been scared off from purchasing this because I then faced the dilemma of how to stabilize our new basketball hoop base. I feared the water & antifreeze method knowing that many still had the cracking issue from winter freezes. I read that sand is the preferred item from the manufactures but worried about how totally immobile the hoop would then become. I came back to Amazon and ordered the gel. Meanwhile my son wanted to play… we put some weights on it externally and I worried. By that evening I ran out to buy sand. First mistake, I bought sand for pavers. Despite the bag being dry, the sand wasn’t. It was coarse and damp and definitely wouldn’t pour. I wound up cupping handfuls and slowly filling that little hole with one .5 cubic ft, 50lb bag of sand! (Yes, I used a funnel, but it kept clogging, I made different variations but ultimately my hands worked best!) I returned the other 4 bags the next day and bought one bag of playground sand. Ok, that poured but still a chore and by now the H2old gel had arrived. I went online and watched videos to see the issues of how to use it and why others had problems. Now I worried if it would still work with some sand already in the base? I went to the manufacturer’s website. I filled out the form and asked the question. One of the Amazon commenters said It would be fine, but was that right? The next day I called the company and left a voice message with their customer service folks asking the question. Left another message the next day. Meanwhile the base is partially filled, my son is playing on it but lightly (!) and I am holding the bag of this stuff and fretting! OMG! LOL! The net was built on Tuesday, now it’s Sunday and I’m about to just go for it since I never got any response from the company. Then it dawned on me that one of the videos showed a demo of how the gel forms by using a basin so you can see it firm up. So I got a kitchen basin, lined the bottom with sand guestimating the ratio of how much sand I’d already poured into our base and then added water and a couple ounces of gel (according to the formula on the manufacturers FAQ page pasted below. It worked. The sand didn’t interfere at all. So, I grabbed the hose and started filling the base, then added the gel (our base was only 25 gallons, so I didn’t need the whole bag) and even after my experiment, I still had about 4.5 ounces leftover. At the end, I’d read that it didn’t hurt if you used more than you needed since some people had used 2 bags, so I just dumped the rest in and even glopped the gel/sand mix in from my basin! It firmed up and is so sturdy my kid can (try to) dunk! We couldn’t budge it! So instead of worrying for days like I did, go for it. It works. (h2old.com) Portable bases vary in size from 25 gallon to 40 gallon capacity. One 16 oz bottle of BaseGel absorbs more than 40 gallons of water. A full bottle per portable base is recommended to prevent calculation errors. One ounce (weight) of BaseGel per 2.5 gallons of water may be used, at at minimum, if less than a full bottle is required (ie. 10 ounces per 25 gallon base, 14 ounces per 35 gallon base) for a base that is smaller than 25 gallons: It is recommended that a minimum of 3 tea spoons of BaseGel is added for each gallon of water, so as an example, a 4 gallon umbrella stand would need 12 tea spoons of BaseGel to absorb the water and make a gel with a firm consistency. One bottle of BaseGel contains approximately 120 tea spoons.
