Concrete Pumping in Kent

A boom pump is truck-mounted and carries a folding placing boom. It sets up in the street or the yard and places concrete over a building, across a garden, or several storeys up, with the operator directing the end hose. It is the answer where the pour is high, or beyond an obstacle, or both.

A line pump, sometimes called a static or trailer pump, feeds concrete through hose laid on the ground. It goes through a doorway, along a corridor, through a building and out the other side, and around corners a boom cannot see past. It is the answer where the pour is at ground level but a long way from anywhere a lorry can stand.

The site decides which. Where a boom would fit, it is usually faster. Where it would not, a line pump reaches places nothing else will.

When a pump earns its cost

The straightforward case is distance: the pour is further from the standing position than a chute reaches, and the alternative is barrowing.

The other cases are less obvious and often more compelling. A pour that has to be continuous, such as a raft, a large floor or a wall, because pumping keeps concrete arriving at the placing face without the stop-start of barrow runs. A pour at height, into columns or an upper floor. A pour where wheeling loaded barrows across finished surfaces, a lawn, a membrane or newly fixed reinforcement would damage them. And a pour where the placing rate has to match a formwork design.

Setting a pump up on a Kent or Medway site

A pump needs somewhere to stand, and the requirements are specific. Firm, level ground that will carry the machine on its outriggers. Enough room to deploy those outriggers fully, which is wider than the vehicle. Clear space for a mixer to reverse to the hopper. Overhead clearance, with overhead power lines treated as an absolute exclusion rather than something to work around.

What is underneath matters as much as what is above. Outrigger loads are concentrated, so a basement, a cellar, a culvert, a drainage run or a soakaway beneath the standing position is a serious question and not a detail. Establish it before the day.

Washout and water

Every pump job ends with the line and the hopper being cleaned out, and that washout has to go somewhere.

Concrete washout is strongly alkaline and is a pollutant. It must not enter a surface water drain, a watercourse or a highway gully, and doing so is an offence the Environment Agency can act on. Provide a contained washout point on site, agreed with the pump operator before work starts.

Provide a clean water supply as well. A pump needs water to prime the line at the start and to clean it at the end, and a site with no water is a site the operator cannot leave properly.

Concrete for a pump is ordered differently

Not every mix pumps. A pumpable concrete needs enough fine material to keep the coarse aggregate suspended and moving through the line, and enough workability to be pushed without segregating. A harsh, stony or stiff mix will block a line, and clearing a blockage is slow, unpleasant and occasionally dangerous.

Say at the point of order that the concrete is being pumped, and say how far and how high. The mix is adjusted for it, usually through consistence and sometimes through aggregate size. This is the single most common avoidable failure on a pumped pour, and it is avoided by one sentence on the order.

Booking the pump and the concrete together

The pump and the concrete have to arrive in step. A pump waiting on concrete is expensive standing time. Concrete waiting on a pump is a load approaching the end of its working life.

Kent Readymix arranges both through one approved supplier so the delivery pattern is planned around the pump’s placing rate rather than left to chance. Your quotation, delivery and payment are agreed directly with the approved supplier appointed to your pour.

Arranging a pump and a delivery together

Send the total volume, the distance from where a pump could stand to the pour, the height if the pour is above ground level, what is overhead, what is underground, and where washout could be contained. Between them those answers decide boom or line, and the size of machine.

For commercial customers on an agreed contract, delivery within hours is sometimes possible depending on location and availability. In every case your approved supplier confirms the window once the pump and the pour are scheduled together.