Concrete pour rate

Bucket size and the round trip, in — how much concrete an hour and how much lands in a shift, out. In metres and in yards.

How it is worked out

• Buckets an hour = 60 ÷ the round trip in minutes
• Concrete an hour = bucket size × buckets an hour
• In the shift = concrete an hour × the hours you are pouring

There is no fudge factor in there, and that is on purpose. If you want an allowance for breaks, a late truck or the pump arriving, put it in the shift hours where you can see it — a hidden efficiency percentage is how a pour plan quietly becomes fiction.

What decides the cycle

• The distance and the height. A bucket going up forty floors and out sixty metres is a different lap from one crossing a slab on grade.
• Who is on the end of it. A crew that lands the bucket, dumps and clears in fifteen seconds beats one that takes a minute, every single lap, all day.
• The trucks. The crane cannot go faster than the concrete arrives. Work out the rate here, then check how many trucks an hour that actually needs.
• Wind and visibility. Both slow a cycle down long before either stops the job.

Metres and yards

A cubic yard is 0.764 554 857 984 cubic metres exactly — about three quarters. Concrete is ordered in cubic metres here and cubic yards over the line, and on a small pour the difference between the two is a whole truck. The unit converter has it if you need it on its own.

This is the crane’s rate, not the pour’s. Time the whole cycle with a stopwatch over ten buckets and put the average in — one good cycle is not a rate.