Prices & price lists for gabion baskets and gabion stones

If the gabions are not to be built into stable constructions, but you are just looking for a new eye-catcher to decorate the garden, you can buy the most “delicate” gabions that are on offer.

Many design gabions are simply placed, they consist of a single wire body and are the height of a small garden sculpture. You get garden bench gabions, gabion water dispensers, gabion trellis columns, gabion rainwater barrels and gabion herb spirals. You can purchase gabion shapes as/for wall lattices (wall lattice), heart-shaped lattice, raised beds, flower pots, raised ponds, barbecue fireplaces and high barbecue fireplaces, house wall beds and snail showers (garden shower + changing room).

Prices can only be compared here for gabion shapes that have become very well known on the market. such as B. the herb spiral gabion, where you will find gabion baskets in almost the same sizes:

• A herb spiral gabion, 2 x 1.5 m, 80 cm high, is available with a zinc-aluminium coating for €319 at www.draht-driller.de
• At www.steinfiguren.net , this galvanized steel herb spiral costs €272.99
• It is offered for €275 at www.devo-baumarkt.de/kraeuterspirale , but you don’t find out anything about the material.

The price differences result here mainly from the coating (alloy), with zinc-aluminum coatings z. B. pointed to the particularly long shelf life. However, the hot-dip galvanizing industry association has just criticized the new alloy coatings from hot-dip finishing, “the statements made by the suppliers on the quality of their coatings (bring) only to the expression of wishful thinking” (www.blechnet.com/themen/oberflaechentechnik/articles/426290).

You can only determine whether it is worth spending more on a specific coating if you take a very close look at coatings. If this is necessary (see “Sturdy gabion structures” below), you should do that or use hot-dip galvanized gabions. With hot-dip galvanized steel, you can assume a protection period of 50 years or more.

With small ornamental buildings, it usually doesn’t matter how many decades the gabions can last. If the steel corrodes a bit, they won’t fall apart right away. This can even look very pretty in the natural environment of the garden, e.g. B. with galvanized iron baskets.

Gabion ornament for creative people

In the case of small ornamental buildings, it doesn’t even matter whether the wire construction was called a gabion basket when you bought it or not. A small column of two tiers for a flower pot can be built from any metal basket that can withstand stone fillings, it does not necessarily have to be “gabion baskets”.

There are many wire baskets, stackable baskets for goods, parts of closet systems, vintage shopping baskets, old pots, bird cages, firewood baskets… Once these wire baskets are the right size, they can become gabions and fill the garden with stones. At junk dealers, such wire baskets often cost a fraction of what gabion dealers call for mini gabions.

Whenever gabions are to be stacked into something resembling a small structure – a wall, privacy screen, slope stabilization, even the frame of a larger raised bed – you can’t use just any gabions, only those that can withstand the loads that will occur:

Stable gabion structures require pre-selection

The prices for gabions vary greatly. This is partly due to the irrepressible will to sell, partly there are factual reasons for this, because the gabions have to meet certain requirements. Before starting the price comparison, you should therefore make a pre-selection for gabion structures according to the various criteria that also affect the prices of the gabions. A price comparison is only possible if you compare the same with the same. You would have to choose one of several variants for the following characteristics:

• Larger gabions are relatively cheaper than smaller ones
• The prices of the gabions vary with the grid thickness
• And with the alloy of the wire used
• Gabions with strong wire that is weatherproof alloy can last forever
• However, this is not necessary for every gabion construction
• The mesh size causes price differences, narrow fields = more wire
• However, narrow fields can be the salvation if the gabions are to be placed at the back of the garden
• And the filling is driven backwards with the wheelbarrow and has to be brought in by hand/bucket
• Gabions on certain floors (e.g. slope) must meet DIN standards (safety classes).

Gabion baskets – price comparison

If you know which gabion baskets it should be, you can compare prices. So you call up a gabion dealer on the Internet and download a price list or have it sent to you.

You get e.g. B. a document with 12.8 MB and 87 items: Item number, mesh width, dimensions of the gabion, assembly form, parts of the kit, price and surcharge for wire diameter 5 instead of 4.5 mm. When you need a wire diameter of 5 mm instead of 4.5 mm is not explained (according to the company’s e-mail information, gabions with 4.5 mm thick wire are sufficient for most building projects, which would be installed to 95%) that If you buy 5 pieces or more, the price drops significantly, you won’t find out in the price list, but only on the Internet.

The price list describes gabion construction kits on 32 pages, but the construction does not exactly facilitate a price comparison, as the following example of prices for a gabion basket construction kit of 1 x 1 m with a depth of 50 cm and wire thickness 4.5 mm shows:

So you can buy basically the same gabion basket for €44.90 (spiral assembly, 10×10 mesh) or €99.90 (plug-in assembly, 5×10 mesh), more than twice as much.

That’s a significant difference, and it gets bigger when you need multiple kits. Let’s assume you want to build a gabion wall that is 10 meters long and 1 meter high and 50 cm thick. Make a list of the right kits:

• Dimension 1 and dimension 2 (fixed here, 1 m high and 50 cm thick)
• Dimension3, widths of 50 cm, 1 m, 2 m can be used here
• Amount of gabions for 10 m, here 20, 10 or 5 gabions
• Mesh width, here 5 x 10 and 10 x 10 cm
• Mounting form, spiral or plug-in system
• Price from 5 pieces, you always need them here at 10 m
• total price

If you look up the prices from the long price list and enter them in this list, you will find something amazing: you come up with 14 different combinations to create a gabion wall in exactly the same dimensions, with prices ranging from €344.50 (5 x 2 m spiral gabion with 10×10 mesh) and €1,338 (20 x 50 cm plug-in gabion with 5×10 mesh).

As I said, the price difference increases, for your 10 m gabion wall you can spend around €350, but also 4 times as much. Maybe you want that, the expensive solution is a little different than the cheap one – but you should consciously decide to pay € 1,000 more for half mesh size, plug-in system and more gabions to be assembled (20 instead of 5).

Price lists for gabion baskets, which provide you with the starting values ​​for your own comparison list, can be found here:

• www.draht-driller.de/shop/catalog/index.php?cPath=23
• www.gabiona.de
• www.gabionenrafmet.de/preisliste.html
• https://www.gabionenkaiser.de/preislisten
• www.hornbach.de/shop/GartenbauLandschaftsbau/Gartenbaustoffe/Gabionen/S1578/artikelliste.html

Price lists for gabion stones can be found here:

• www.baustoffe-liefern.de , enter postal code
• www.beckmann-bauzentrum.de/service/preislisten.html
• www.hornbach.de , enter gabion stones or quarry stones in the search mask
• https://www.steinhafen.com/gabionen-zaun/preislisten/

the filling

The filling material also has a decisive influence on the total price of your gabion structure.

Just a few stones, that’s how it seems at first, some gabion buyers even want to collect them in the river around the corner. Even if this river is rocky in the truest sense of the word, it would quickly lose its desire to collect, for the 10 m gabion wall assumed in the example, a good 8 tons = 3.5 cubic meters of filling are needed for river pebbles.

You can calculate how many gabions you need, e.g. B. on www.draht-driller.de/gartengestaltung/gabionen/gabionenkoerbe.html , in the text there is a link to the online calculator. After entering the basket size, quantity, stone type and wire gauge, you must select the empty portion; which one, you can find out from the building materials dealer, the value is between 30 and 35% depending on the stone.

The filling material is similar to the gabion baskets, without a careful price comparison you can “surprisingly become impoverished” with gabion stones.

You can fill our 10 m long example gabion wall with gabion stones “Barbarossa Rot” or “Heinrich Grau” for €904.50, but you won’t find out exactly which stone it is. Or you choose the basalt gabion stone “Augustus the Black”, then the filling costs €1,079.50 without shipping costs.

If you are not looking for “gabion stones”, but simply get the right stones from a quarry or building materials dealer in the area, you can get your gabion filling cheaper. A nearby quarry will definitely have a good offer for you, and maybe the nearest builders’ merchant will too, and if you are not looking for gabion stones, but for stones, there are many interesting options:

• Brick recycling is unbeatably cheap, the reddish tone can go well: 6.16 per ton, less than 50 for the filling of our example wall
• Not bad either: Recycled gravel 40-80 mm for €7.70 per ton, example filling for €61.60 (origin and freedom from harmful substances can be guaranteed)
• ava 56-80 mm is an interesting filling material and costs only €25 per tonne, €200 for the sample filling
• Glass foam gravel Misapor is light and costs around €90 per cubic meter, €270 for the example filling with “light river pebbles”.
• Hydraulic engineering gravel 60-120 mm, €81.52 per m³, sample filling for €285.32 is also very interesting
• Lime gravel 60-120 mm gray is available for around €50 per ton, €400 for the sample filling

This is just a first overview, there are still a few ways to fill gabions creatively and at an affordable price, including very unusual ones such as lava mineral substrate for gabion fillings that can be planted all around. Affordable doesn’t matter, you want to let it rip? You can, with luxury materials such as glass blocks in various colors as a gabion filling, but then they also cost around €1,200 per ton, a whopping €9,600 for our example wall.

Don’t forget construction costs

Sometimes a structural engineer has to check and calculate, sometimes you need permits that are subject to a fee. Depending on the size of your gabion construction, there are some additional construction costs:

• Maybe for a foundation
• Or for concrete slabs that are laid out under the gabions
• Sometimes the half-flat garden wheelbarrow has to give way to a transport wheelbarrow
• For filling “by hand” you need a sturdy shovel, bucket with handles, cut-proof gloves
• There may be rental costs for a motorized wheelbarrow or a tracked vehicle with a telescopic tipper from the nearest hardware store
• The delivery costs must also be included in the comparison list, they can vary greatly

Conclusion
The prices for gabion baskets vary greatly; When it comes to real gabion constructions, a pre-selection is recommended before comparing prices. The price lists for gabion baskets are usually not suitable for a really clear price comparison, this only works if you create a comparison list yourself. No time? Think carefully, it can result in an hourly wage that is interesting even for high earners! Price lists for gabion stones will be easier to compare and prices cheaper if you are not looking for gabion stones but for stones.