73. Busting Concrete Myths

Andrea and Griffin go through some external and internal myths about concrete and bring the facts! 

Also the Bix and it's hot outside.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:08

Welcome to Loaded, the Han Ready Mix podcast with Andrea Meyer, Griffin Han, and producer Lex. On top of his game today.

SPEAKER_00 0:15

Yes, he is. I am. What are you guys doing?

SPEAKER_01 0:20

We've had a few restarts here, which is unusual for us, but I think we're ready now.

SPEAKER_00 0:25

Well, if John just didn't try to call us right now. Right.

SPEAKER_01 0:27

Interruptions, disruptions, a lot going on.

SPEAKER_00 0:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 0:31

As we do at this time of the year.

SPEAKER_00 0:33

Mm-hmm. What's going on right now?

SPEAKER_01 0:36

We're busy.

SPEAKER_00 0:37

We're busy. Love it.

SPEAKER_01 0:39

We're sweaty.

SPEAKER_00 0:40

It is hot. Everybody make sure you stay hydrated and keep cool as well as you can. Because it's it's brutal out there. And hopefully, when we're listening to this uh on Monday, that I think it looks like it might be the last really, really hot day.

SPEAKER_01 0:55

For the next 10 days.

SPEAKER_00 0:56

Yes, right. Yeah. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 0:58

We're not done being hot, but it does look like it's gonna cool off a little, which makes everybody's jobs just a little easier.

SPEAKER_00 1:04

Yeah, hopefully. Hopefully.

SPEAKER_01 1:06

Very good. How was your trip?

SPEAKER_00 1:08

It's good. Yeah, lots of fun.

SPEAKER_01 1:10

What's what's the soccer update? I'm dying to know.

SPEAKER_00 1:14

Uh so the World Cup final is between Spain and Argentina. And um in our pool, it's down to just jergens and dubs. So everybody else is toast. Uh, but those two are a point apart. So there's two games to go, the third place game and the title. So uh it'll be fun.

SPEAKER_01 1:36

Dubbs is pretty serious competitor in this stuff. Wasn't he good in the March Madness also?

SPEAKER_00 1:40

I think I'm trying to remember if he he might have. Did he win that? I'm not sure. He definitely won the fantasy football league.

SPEAKER_01 1:46

Uh maybe that's what I'm thinking of. But yeah, he's either he's lucky or he's a stat rat.

SPEAKER_00 1:51

I think he has um you know personal time ability to to put towards resource res research and and you know, all that stuff. So that's good for me.

SPEAKER_01 2:02

He cares deeply about everything he does, just like at work.

SPEAKER_00 2:04

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 2:05

It's great. Also on the sports line, uh the Bix relay this week, right?

SPEAKER_00 2:12

Very excited, even though I didn't make the team.

SPEAKER_01 2:14

Are we trained and ready, conditioned?

SPEAKER_00 2:16

Everybody's um Yeah, we've been we've been putting in the miles.

SPEAKER_01 2:20

We've been Are you confident?

SPEAKER_00 2:22

We're gonna we're gonna kick the shit out of Whitey's. That's what's gonna happen.

SPEAKER_01 2:25

Uh I'm not sure about that. We'll see. We'll see. There's a chance we won't get last place, I think.

SPEAKER_00 2:31

I I feel good about it. I feel good about it. So that's uh Thursday night.

SPEAKER_01 2:35

Thursday. I can't remember if it's at five or six, uh, but it it is televised on channel six. So you can if you can't come out and sit on Brady Street and cheer them on, you can watch it on TV.

SPEAKER_00 2:46

Uh so it's seven o'clock.

SPEAKER_01 2:48

Seven o'clock on Thursday.

SPEAKER_00 2:50

On Thursday is um, and they're broadcast live. So if you can't make it to downtown Davenport.

SPEAKER_01 2:55

Yes. And I the I think that the sponsor relay is the last event.

SPEAKER_00 2:59

I believe you're right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:00

But also Sam is competing in the Masters individual sprint, right?

SPEAKER_00 3:05

Yes. Hopefully he saves saves a little energy in the tank. Yeah, yeah. So we're yeah, we're gonna need him to put his best effort into the sponsor relay.

SPEAKER_01 3:16

I think he ha he has it in him to do both.

SPEAKER_00 3:18

Because I think the what he's doing, the other one, he's got to run the whole 400 yards. Yes. Yeah, he's I better be ready on standby in case he can't.

SPEAKER_01 3:26

You're the alternate.

SPEAKER_00 3:26

I'm the alternate. So I'd up I'll come dressed to compete if I have to.

SPEAKER_01 3:31

So all right, very good.

SPEAKER_00 3:33

Yeah, and we have all everybody going out to the BICS, all of our drivers in the trucks on the BICS on Saturday. So appreciate everybody and Friday evening for the junior BICS. Appreciate everybody that does that. I think it's an awesome look for our company and the community. And and I think everybody has fun doing it. So uh appreciate all you that are going out there.

SPEAKER_01 3:54

Uh I just wanted to remind everyone we have all kinds of fiber. How many different kinds of fiber do we have?

SPEAKER_00 4:00

Uh at least five.

SPEAKER_01 4:02

At least five. So if your order calls for fiber, you may have to ask yourself or someone around you or the batcher what fiber we're talking about. Yeah. I think they do a pretty good job of trying to spell it out uh on the ticket, but it can be confusing if you are not aware of the different kinds of fiber. So just take your time, ask someone else, get some more information, because putting the wrong fiber in your load can ruin the load and have it be rejected.

SPEAKER_00 4:32

Yes. Um, and and the amount of fiber as well, make sure we're doing that correctly. So we got to have the right dosage and the right stuff. All right. Should we get into it?

SPEAKER_01 4:43

Very good. Let's get started.

SPEAKER_00 4:44

Okay. So I thought we would do a little myth busting on this episode. So uh I think we'll have you read these statements that you very firmly believe. And we'll say whether they're whether they are a myth or a fact.

SPEAKER_01 5:03

Okay. Is this gonna be a rapid fire like you usually do, or are you gonna go into detail?

SPEAKER_00 5:09

We'll do it on a case-by-case basis. How about that?

SPEAKER_01 5:12

Okay. First statement cement and concrete are the same thing. Interchangeable words. I hear this all the time. Has to be true.

SPEAKER_00 5:20

Yeah. And so I think I should preface we're gonna go through like common misconceptions from outside first, right?

SPEAKER_01 5:27

And then some that our own Han ready mix uh misinformation.

SPEAKER_00 5:31

Yes. So this this is in the category of just the general the whole world. The whole world.

SPEAKER_01 5:36

The whole world thinks cement and concrete are the same thing.

SPEAKER_00 5:39

And they are not. So um I hope everybody here knows this, but cement is obviously an ingredient in concrete. It's kind of like calling a cake flour. Yes, there is flour in a cake generally, and you need flour to make a cake. It might be the most important ingredient, but a flour and a cake are very different things. So similar concept. That's a good description.

SPEAKER_01 6:03

What about I just heard John roasting someone the other day because they were referring to plastic concrete as concrete and not as ready mix. Is that like an official thing that you can you interchange those? Is plastic concrete still concrete or is this?

SPEAKER_00 6:17

It's still concrete. Yeah. Yeah. Just when you say plastic, that's the that is the correct terminology for concrete that's still fresh, wet tone.

SPEAKER_01 6:28

Okay. Concrete dries.

SPEAKER_00 6:30

Yes. So you hear a lot of this like, well, we've got to wait for the concrete to dry. And concrete, other than a little evaporation off the surface, does not dry. It sets and cures, right? So you can pour concrete underwater and it will get hard. In fact, it will get harder underwater than it would just out in the air. Um, and uh, so it it is not a drying process. The water is being chemically subsumed by the cementitious materials in the mix um to form new compounds. So uh the water doesn't dry out and leave, or or most of it doesn't anyway.

SPEAKER_01 7:06

You are over the limit of words people don't understand for this podcast. So just you really went through that limit early. So you're gonna have to think about how you answer the rest of these. Uh slump measures the quality of the concrete.

SPEAKER_00 7:20

No. Is that simple enough? Uh so slump is an important measure for concrete. It's to measure the consistency of the concrete. And that's important. If you have a high slump, you know, you can't do a build a curb with it. And if you need to make a wall have a smooth finish, you don't want to put uh curb concrete in there, right? So slump is important as a measure, but it tells us nothing about the quality of the concrete. So we see sometimes on specifications where they put like a slump limit because they want the concrete to be good, and that is just really archaic and and it's kind of dumb, honestly.

SPEAKER_01 8:00

Agreed. Concrete that cracks is bad concrete.

SPEAKER_00 8:03

Yeah. So we hear this occasionally, somebody will call in and say, My concrete was bad. We must have got bad concrete because it it cracked. And um, I would say like 95% of the time that that is not how that works. In fact, higher strength concrete is more prone to cracking because to get higher strength, you put more cementitious materials in the mix, uh, which means it shrinks more, and that's the kind of cracking we typically see is drying shrinkage cracking. So the way to prevent that is by putting in joints at correct spacing, at the correct depth, at the correct time. And so that is how you prevent that. And then the other most common type of cracking we see is plastic shrinkage cracking, and that is from surface evaporation. Um, neither of those are a sign of bad concrete. And in the case of drying shrinkage, it's kind of the more expensive concrete you get, the more likely that is to happen. The only time concrete cracks are bad is if they don't meet the strength that is necessary, and you get kind of a shattered glass look. But uh I think the amount of times I've seen that in my career is like I this is like maybe two, like that I've seen that. So it's really rare. So normally when concrete cracks, it is not a sign that the concrete is bad in any way. It's that it may have set too fast or faster than the contractor was expecting. And a number of other things can happen, but it's normally not bad concrete.

SPEAKER_01 9:26

Okay, here's another one that we see a lot. Um, I bought this bag of salt that says it's safe for concrete.

SPEAKER_00 9:35

Mm-hmm. And uh this this always blows my mind. Like I don't understand how there hasn't been like lawsuits about this. So if you go to Menards or Home Depot or wherever, and a lot of times the bags that say safe for concrete on them, if you flip it over and look in the ingredients, and they'll have like urea and fertilizer, which are worse than salts for concrete. But they say safe for concrete. And I don't understand how they can get away with that. Uh but um the we've said it before, we'll say it again. If you must salt, use coarse rock salt uh as little as you can, and then sweep it off as soon as it has done the job and melted this the snow and ice that you need to melt. Um, that is going to be your your least intrusive of the de-icers.

SPEAKER_01 10:23

Yeah, that's one that we hear when we're looking at someone's damaged concrete.

SPEAKER_00 10:27

Yeah. And they're like, oh, I put this fertilizer on there. Like, what? It's gonna eat it alive. You can't do that.

SPEAKER_01 10:32

That does not work. All right. When you can walk on the concrete, it's done.

SPEAKER_00 10:36

Yeah. So we don't hear this a ton, but occasionally somebody will say that, and and concrete continues to gain strength. And if you keep it with access to water, it will theoretically gain strength, you know, for years and years and years. Um but it it's certainly most concrete. We measure the strength at 28 days. So there's definitely reactions and strength gain happening through at least that amount of time, even without um if it hasn't been properly cured. So you normally can walk on concrete the same day you pour it, and um, it is just beginning its journey to getting to its final form.

SPEAKER_01 11:14

All right, we're gonna get political here. Concrete is bad for the environment.

SPEAKER_00 11:18

Yes, yes. So this is a a hot topic, not so much around here, but like in Washington, DC or you know, in Europe, things like that. Cement is the number one pollution generating industry in the world. Um, but that is because there's so much of it that is made. If you look at it on like a per pound or per ton basis, it's um actually pretty low carbon output. But on a on, you know, just the amount of it that goes out is is how you get to the numbers at it being the number one polluter. But it's important to know that concrete is a carbon sink, so it absorbs carbon out of the atmosphere. And there's a bunch of environmental benefits of using concrete um, you know, versus asphalt and uh not using petroleum products directly in the putting it down and a lack of a heat island effect where there's less heat reflectivity. Um and then we can use a lot of recycled products like flash and slag in concrete to reduce the environmental impact. So there's a lot of ways that, you know, I'm I'm not gonna say, you know, concrete is as good as a tree for the environment. That's not true, but it you we must build with something, and it is um it is better really than many of the other options out there.

SPEAKER_01 12:40

That kind of leads to the next one that I have here, which is about how fly ash and slag are just junk fillers that we use to make the concrete cheaper.

SPEAKER_00 12:48

Yeah, that is um, it's easy to prove this one. You know, when you look at strengths, a a mix with fly ash or slag or both will outperform, especially after like the somewhere between five to seven days, will be a higher strength than a mix with just cement. So what we're doing there is making the cement more efficient because the fly ash and slag have a higher silica content. And um the part of concrete that gives it strength is when calcium and silica and hydrogen from water bond together and cement is a little low in silica. So if we can introduce other silica, uh we can get higher efficiency with our cement and actually reduce the total amount of cementitious in the mix, make it cheaper, more environmentally friendly, all those things uh shrink less uh and still achieve the strengths that we need.

SPEAKER_01 13:42

How about this one? Summer concrete is better and stronger than winter concrete.

SPEAKER_00 13:47

Yes. So this is a this is one like I, you know, I would not recommend pouring exterior concrete in the winter, in the middle of winter, you know, in harsh conditions, because it's more likely that it could freeze and permanently damage the concrete, right? So with that caveat aside, if you can protect it from freezing, if you can slow the strength gain, which is amplified by temperature, right? So concrete will set slower and gain strength slower when it's 40 degrees outside than it will when it's 90 degrees outside, eventually it will be stronger. It takes longer to get there. So 90 degree concrete will gain its strength really fast and then it's kind of done. Um, and concrete poured in the winter and colder conditions will gain much slower, but it will eventually well outper outperform from a strength perspective and a quality perspective, concrete poured in the summer.

SPEAKER_01 14:42

As long as it doesn't freeze.

SPEAKER_00 14:44

As long as it doesn't freeze, yes.

SPEAKER_01 14:46

It's a tough, tough balance sometimes.

SPEAKER_00 14:48

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 14:48

Curing is just making sure the concrete doesn't freeze.

SPEAKER_00 14:52

Yeah. So we hear people are really good about watching this. Our customers are anyway, like, oh gosh, it's gonna get cold. I better cover my concrete with blankets. And that is important, like we just talked about. We don't want the concrete to freeze, but the the act of curing concrete is making sure that the concrete has the required temperature to have the chemical reaction it needs, and the amount of water it needs to have the reactions happen. And so we don't want the concrete to dry out, right? Because it doesn't, it needs that water to have that chemical reaction. So you can either, you know, uh pond water on top or put wet burlap, or uh as we um more often see these days, put a curing compound on. But that's really important way to cure the concrete properly to make sure it achieves the uh strength and durability that it's kind of designed and intended to have.

SPEAKER_01 15:44

Higher strength means better concrete.

SPEAKER_00 15:47

Yeah. So we're judged by strength typically in this industry, right? So our customers are really happy when they order a 4,000 psi mix and the strengths come back at 7,000 psi or whatever. And you know, that helps us all sleep at night that we have that margin of safety, right, in there. But with higher strength comes uh the higher potential for cracking, the higher potential for shrinkage. Yeah, it's it's not always better, especially when you talk about pavements. You want the pavements to flex a little bit. Really high strength pavements don't flex at all. So they're tend to be more brittle. That's why you may hear someone talk about an M4 mix, just doesn't last very long. Well, that's a really, really high strength mix, and its durability just isn't very high. And in those situations, that leaves them really open as well chemically to um attacks from salt when you have high cementitious mixes. So overdoing strength, particularly on pavements, is not the best route. You want to hit there's a minimum strength we need for the traffic that is gonna be on it, but you you don't want to be too far above that.

SPEAKER_01 16:54

Reinforcing your concrete will make sure it doesn't crack.

SPEAKER_00 16:58

Yeah. So this is another common misconception. Reinforcing concrete is designed to take tensile forces that could cause your concrete to crack, but a lot of times they're holding cracks together, are there for you know a structural purpose. So just because you've put rebar in your driveway doesn't mean it won't crack.

SPEAKER_01 17:20

Wire mesh and microfiber are the same thing.

SPEAKER_00 17:24

They're not. They're not for sure. So microfiber really protects against plastic shrinkage cracking, and wire mesh is giving you some of that tensile support and microfiber just can't do that. Structural fiber can, and is a is a decent uh replacement for wire mesh, but not microfiber.

SPEAKER_01 17:42

Perfect finish is the goal for concrete.

SPEAKER_00 17:44

Yeah, so a lot of our customers I know like to get out on knee boards and scrub the concrete until it's there's not a single imperfection anywhere out there, and they take a lot of pride in that perfect kind of look to the concrete. While I definitely admire their work ethic and dedication, overfinishing the concrete really can hurt. It can knock the air out of the surface, which hurts our freeze thaw durability and bring water up to the surface so we have a higher water smart ratio. So especially with exterior concrete, the less we can touch it, the better it is for the concrete.

SPEAKER_01 18:19

Concrete is bad at 90 minutes or 90 degrees.

SPEAKER_00 18:23

So we see this in specs a lot where they say 90 degrees is a limit, you know, and the concrete's got to be rejected after that. And that's just there's no basis in that as long as the contractor is prepared, because it's gonna set fast over that time, right? It could be just fine over 90. There's a lot more caution and attention that needs to be paid, but it can be done. Same thing with 90 degrees or 90 minutes. We can put in a retarder hydration stabilizer, and we can put concrete to sleep for five, six hours and then reactivate it with an accelerator, and it's just fine. So it's just not a it's just so arbitrary.

SPEAKER_01 18:58

Yeah. It's not a not an automatic throwaway. It's a let's be intentional when we get to these limits.

SPEAKER_00 19:03

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 19:04

Got it. All right. Should we move on to some uh more internal, maybe funnier?

SPEAKER_00 19:10

Uh we'll see.

SPEAKER_01 19:13

I think so. Uh okay. Water added on site is the same as water added when you're getting patched.

SPEAKER_00 19:20

Yeah. So a lot of people think water's water, right? Well, water added later in the load is more damaging to concrete than water added initially. And the water initially is going to be a lot more efficient. So we can get our slump and hold our slump better with water added earlier in the load. Water added later is less likely to be perfectly mixed through the whole load. So we have kind of variable water cement ratio. And um it just has a lot more potential for damaging the concrete.

SPEAKER_01 19:50

The only reason we care about clean trucks is so that they look good.

SPEAKER_00 19:54

So this is this is a partial myth, right? So uh yes, we want them to look good. They're kind of like our rolling billboards, all of our trucks are, and we should take pride in how they look. Uh that's really important. But there's also a maintenance aspect of this, right? So a clean truck is less likely to break down because there's, you know, less less buildup happening on important electrical wires or hydraulic lines or whatever. And then they're also a lot easier to fix. Uh, should something happen and we need to get underneath the truck and it's clean and when well taken care of, then we can get that truck back on the road quicker.

SPEAKER_01 20:30

Yeah, we also care about trucks being clean when we're doing like a color load or something has to be mixed in. If the truck is full of concrete, it's not going to mix properly for the quality of the concrete or dispersing the color the way it should. Yeah. And also safety. If you have concrete caked up on the back of your truck and you go over a big bump and some of it falls off and hits the car behind you, then I get a call. Sheldon gets a call. Sometimes it comes to me, but yeah, uh, it it is dangerous. So there's a million reasons why we want trucks to be clean every day.

SPEAKER_00 21:01

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 21:02

Driving down the road with the hopper up will dry up your load.

unknown 21:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:06

Uh so I hadn't heard this one before, but somebody said that they'd heard it. There are times where like a truck is borderline, or like, ooh, it might be a touch too wet. Put your hopper up when you wash down. And the idea is to make sure when you're washing down your hopper that that water doesn't go into the load, but then put it back because you're not doing anything by driving down the road with a hopper up. And I I pass trucks, I don't know, uh, maybe once a week with a hopper up. And I I make a symbol out of like pointing down. So if you drive by me and I'm pointing down frantically, uh, means your hopper's up and put it down. I feel like nobody ever knows what I'm doing when I when I do that. So they give you like a thumbs up back when you do that.

SPEAKER_01 21:46

All right. Faster mixing speed while you're in transit will keep the concrete wetter and better, keep your load fresh.

SPEAKER_00 21:53

Yeah. So this is definitely in the in the summer. This is very untrue. So we need Have from our dry batch plants 70, you know, full speed revs in the yard to make sure the concrete is fully mixed. After that, we want to agitate the concrete really slowly. So the slowest you can turn it and it stays in the truck is what we want to do. Um, because the more revolutions we put, the more heat we're generating in the concrete, the more slump loss we'll have, the more air loss we'll have. If the concrete sits still, then it will start to set. So we don't want to sit still. We want to keep it in motion, but the slowest motion we can. That's the target.

SPEAKER_01 22:33

Yeah, we hear this when someone gets to a job and the slump is off and they said, Well, I knew it, I knew it was gonna go, so I just kept the drum moving really fast.

SPEAKER_00 22:44

Yeah. We're doing the opposite. You're putting heat into the concrete, it's gonna set up quicker and lose more slump.

SPEAKER_01 22:50

All right. You can get up a steep hill without spilling concrete by putting the drum into full charge.

SPEAKER_00 22:56

So this is a trick that uh it's definitely a tool out there, but I but I guess the myth part of this is just avoid those hills if you can.

SPEAKER_01 23:04

Uh yes, or be really sure which way is full charge and which way is discharge.

SPEAKER_00 23:09

Well, that for sure. Yeah, obviously putting it into full charge is going to push the concrete to the front and gives us a better chance, but we still spill a lot. So it's definitely no guarantee just because you put it in full charge that you're not going to spill. If the load is really wet or the hill is really steep, you can still make a mess. So avoid those hills uh if you can.

SPEAKER_01 23:29

Discharging the drum fast on a pave gets the remainder of the concrete out.

SPEAKER_00 23:34

This is both an external and external. Because I see our, I see the guys running, you know, we're we're unloading like a one and a half inch slump or something on a pave, and they'll be like, turn it really fast. And that can kind of break some of that left last little bits of concrete out, but then it just rattles around it. It can't get out. So we it if you see somebody do that, turn it really fast for a second and then slow it down again. And then actually the concrete can, it comes out better when it's dry when it's turning slow. Uh, because the fins can catch the concrete and actually push it out. But I've seen that so many times where there's half yard still on the truck because we've just spun it really fast.

SPEAKER_01 24:11

This is one of my favorites. I can tell the slump by how it sounds.

SPEAKER_00 24:18

I guess you could generally know if it's wet or if it's dry, but uh no. We have a hard enough time looking at the concrete and getting accurate slumps if you if you just listen. There's no way. We have different materials that we use in different mix designs, the different amount of those materials, different amount of yards, uh, different trucks may sound different. There's just way too many variables to have any kind of consistency with listening to a load and knowing the slump. Just no way.

SPEAKER_01 24:50

Put your eyes on it every time.

SPEAKER_00 24:52

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 24:52

Uh the water in my truck is mine.

SPEAKER_00 24:56

Yeah. So the water, you know, we've talked a lot about customer service, and part of that is making sure that we get our customers whatever they need. And if they need our water, they need our water. Um, I would say if there's, you know, if it's a multi-truck order and you're getting down low on water that you really need for washout, be like, hey, could you finish this with another truck? I think that's a perfectly reasonable thing to ask. Um, if you're the only truck on site and they want your water, guess we're working a little harder when we get back to the yard to get things cleaned up. That's just how it is. So there's there's folks I know that have been resistant to that, but that is uh just who we are. We're gonna uh get our customers what they need. And if they need our water, that's how it is.

SPEAKER_01 25:38

So we have these pits in the yards at our plants, and that is where we dump leftover concrete.

SPEAKER_00 25:43

No, no, no, no. Uh so we we hear about this at Eldridge, at the River Builders, at Geneseo, that we we have washout pits for where we can basically dump gray water when we're washing out the truck at the end of the day. We do not put concrete in those pits. Nope. We have concrete dump sites that um are where we take that. That's where those need to go.

SPEAKER_01 26:08

I I'm afraid that someone's gonna clip these statements that I'm saying and be viral social media clips of me saying the dumbest possible things.

SPEAKER_00 26:17

The things that you believe. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 26:20

Dispatch hands out the loads to their favorite drivers. Good loads to good drivers, bad loads to bad drivers, their favorites.

SPEAKER_00 26:28

Yeah. Uh this one, I have I haven't heard this in a while, but I have heard this in the past. And uh the simple truth of the matter is, especially when we're busy, they don't have time to do that. There could be instances where it makes sense to put a particular driver on a particular load if the customer has requested uh someone, or it's a tricky spot or hard to get to, and somebody else has been there before. And it's like, okay, well, I know, you know, Matt Green's been to this spot before, so we're gonna send him back because he won't get lost, right? There are logical decisions sometimes that happened, but they don't have time in there to be petty and and try to make people mad. It just there's no way.

SPEAKER_01 27:11

Residual water from washing out, so wash water in the drum won't matter.

SPEAKER_00 27:16

Yeah, so at the end of the load, you know, you might have five gallons in your your drum. The truth of the matter is if you're pouring a commercial pour that's 10 yards, you know, yeah, that that five gallons probably doesn't matter. If you're pouring a single yard, that will definitely matter. That's five inches of slump. So that you know, that's why dispatch sensitive directions to make sure you get rid of any washwater. And we just generally don't want to minimize that as much as possible because there's in any of that residual washwater, there might be residual admixtures. Um, and we just want the mix to be what we're batching, right? So we never batch on top of returned concrete, and we don't want to batch on top of washwater either.

SPEAKER_01 27:58

We are exempt, or we do not have to stop at way stations.

SPEAKER_00 28:01

Yeah. So those are not for us. They unfortunately, I wish this one was true. Uh unfortunately, they are. We we have no exemption, even though we have a perishable load, we have to stop at weigh stations. So if we we try to route around those as much as possible, we try to not take a route that has a way station because we not because we have anything to hide, but because we don't want to wait. And we're on the clock.

SPEAKER_01 28:25

Puts the time out of our control.

SPEAKER_00 28:27

Yes, yes. If we must go, we still have to stop. If we go by a way station and it's open, uh, we have to stop.

SPEAKER_01 28:34

This is a great one to be the last one. And this is that uh following the directions on my tablet GPS is the best way to get to the job.

SPEAKER_00 28:44

Not always. Not always. So we've talked about this before. We'll talk about it again. I'm sure we'll keep reiterating this point. The directions on the ticket are the ones that we need to follow. GPS does not know the situation at the construction sites we're going to that our customers know and are telling us it's important for us from a spacing perspective to have all the trucks take the same route. So if there's no route, there's just an address, the GPS directions are your best bet. And that's great. If there is a route and directions on your ticket, that should be followed every single time. And we should be reading those directions every single time.

SPEAKER_01 29:18

Yeah, the GPS also doesn't know that you're driving a really heavy, really tall truck.

SPEAKER_00 29:23

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 29:23

So it will try to tell you to go places you definitely should not go.

SPEAKER_00 29:27

Yeah, or maybe a less efficient route. Yeah. You know, it takes a lot longer for a ready mix truck to get up and get to speed from a stop sign than it is a regular vehicle. And so they may take you route with 30 stop signs when there's one that's a a minute longer in a car, but has no stop signs, that one will be faster in a mixer.

SPEAKER_01 29:45

When in doubt, ask the ask the batcher to show you the map and talk through different ways to get there.

SPEAKER_00 29:51

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 29:52

Well, you did pretty good.

SPEAKER_00 29:55

I mean, we're definitely over time. But you didn't fall asleep on me talking about technical stuff. So let's.

SPEAKER_01 30:01

I stuck with it, and I'm sure Lux can cut out the worst, most boring parts, but overall you did pretty good.

SPEAKER_00 30:07

Okay, I'll take it. It's a win.

SPEAKER_01 30:08

All right. Thanks for listening to everyone. We'll talk to you again next week.

SPEAKER_00 30:11

Thank you.