Chandler Concrete

Welcome to our virtual field trip with Chandler Concrete. With over 40 ready mix plants across three states, Chandler has been a family owned and operated business for nearly 50 years. Today we'll be touring their ready mix plant in Christiansburg, Virginia, as well as a dry batch plant located in Dublin, Virginia. There are four total plants in the New River Valley. One of the company's two block plants is also located in Christiansburg, although that isn't on our tour today. Chandler's vision is to be a well respected industry leader whose brand contributes to sustainability and who improves the communities they serve. The company has a set of nine guiding principles that lead to operations that are award winning in terms of safety and sustainability. Our tour guide today is Mr. George K On today's tour, we'll look at the different types of plants, different approaches to materials management, the components that are used in concrete, mixing and batc And Let'start our tour at their Dublin, Virginia plant, where we'll look at how a dry batch plant is set up and configured. The trucks actually will back under or pull under depending on the configuration of the plant. They will pull under a silo typically and everyt So you'll see a belt on the left side that is an inclined belt and that brings the aggregates over top of where the truck hopper is. So the loading process in a central mix plant is similar to t Most of the plants, unless you're in larger areas, are dry batch type plants. The central mix plant is a much more costly installation and you typically only see those in high vol The sequencing of this is that typically when you load a truck you would put some of the water or the majority of the water in the admixtures in up front and then the aggregates and the cement and potted ones would all be loaded kind of in a ribbon feeding process so that they're blended as they're going in the truck and the rotation of the dr So a typical mixing cycle once all the materials are in will take 70 or more revolutions and it pulls the material towards the front of the dr In a central mix plant that same loading process into the central mixer would only take about a minute or less of mixing. So here's the conveyor that takes the aggregate up and repairs it and you've got a bunch of different stockpiles of stuff. Yeah so t Because of the capacity and the vol Here you see a hopper and the loader will d They go into storage bins overhead where they are gravity fed into the scale to be loaded into the truck. So what does all this look Alright so all of our plants are equipped with a computer that uses our dispatch and ordering system and what you see here the green bars are our plants so that's our Christiansburg Central Mix plant. T So this particular order is now the way our dispatch system keeps up with t So if you look up here t Over here t So as we get a multiple load order you will see more than one of these underneath an order if it's a single load order there will only ever be one truck and it will just slide left to right. Once it's completed and the truck returns to the plant that order will drop off the system and will no longer be visible and as long as there's a truck on the job these ones here that don't have any trucks under them are either not due to be loaded yet or they're in a will call status or something So what happens is the first t So over here you have our batch system and right here is the screen that basically is configured to show the plant. So here you have our ag scales, up here you have our cement scales, over here all our admixture meters and then t So when the ticket gets sent over w They're already finished but t Okay so the one that just got ticketed needs just regular, there's nothing special being added into that so you go to batch setup and I can verify dosage rates of admixtures if I want to use hot water, there's a tempered water so I can change this and run, So when you get t So once the truck is under the plant w There it is. I don't know if you can hear that. It's only a movement. And now the belt is turned on so now you will see the belt shows that it's running and the water is now starting to go into the truck w Once all the materials are weighed up and the water gets in then you will see the ag scale open up w You will see the weight starting to drop on the ag scale and then as part of the blending t You can see it going in there. So now what you are getting is you are getting blending of the cement and the aggregate and you can see that by the two scale percentages kind of going down in tandem with each other. So t If I d And then a dry batch plant because you are relying on five minutes of mixing on the dr So t We are loading ten yards of concrete here and that is more material than I can get in either the cement or the aggregate scale or combination of both in a single drop. So we split it into two batches and you will see that it completed the first one so now it is weig And when it is completed then it will print a delivery ticket out here on our ticket printer and that gets torn off and given to the driver to take to the customer w Cool. And I noticed some t Yeah, the camera view, t Very cool. And at some of our plants and in our central mix plant you will see where the material actually goes into the truck itself. So now you see the ag is starting to discharge so you can see it pulling it down as it goes out of the bottom of the scale and up the loading belt into the truck itself. Cool. And I mentioned previously our admixture verification system. T 1. So that one ounce variation is wit If one of these detected a difference you would see t Now let's have a look at how the central mix plant is configured. So we built this facility specifically to take advantage of the vol At the time we built t And since then we've done some maintenance we've actually replaced our mixer with a smaller five and a half yard mixer so to do a full load of concrete we actually have to load it in two drops because the speed is not quite as important now. We don't have quite the vol But t We had a rack there that you could put fibers in everyt The advantages from speed of a central mix batch or once the truck is loaded it essentially could pull right back out off the yard there's no need to sit there and have additional mixing because the product is ready to go when it goes into the truck. So what about environmental considerations? Because even in a central mix environment if you're dropping finished product into the hopper the surfaces of the hopper are getting picked with concrete and by was So what happens to your wash water? How do you all treat that? We collect it and Do you allow the heavy stuff to settle out and then recover it? Yeah all the fines will settle to the bottom of the collection pond and then we'll dig that up and then it becomes a product that can be used for fill and other things Much Do you use any recycled aggregate as part of your product? The problem with recycled aggregate is it's not consistent. If I get a load of flowable fillback or a load of 5000 psi concrete back or 2000 psi concrete that was made two days ago they're going to have wildly varying strengths and they're also going to have wildly varying gradations and compositions and while we could do it and use a small amount of it If you were in an urban market and you could count on a regular stream of that material coming in it would make sense to add the cost element to process it and have that as a viable source but the expense of us putting in a way to handle that for the little amount of product. I mean I know you would t If were in an area where we didn't have a market for the crushed up material then it might make some sense in spite of the cost to figure out a way to handle it and use it as a crushed up aggregate source but we don'typically use the crushed material in a load of concrete. One of the main that is certainly useful. Come out here and shade a little bit. Alright so where the trucks will be loaded right here and if they pull out and need to get tested they'll back up right here we've got a kind of a d This is our admixture trailer behind it has all the tanks that hold our admixtures and the big tank in the back is a treated water tank or a heated water tank it's also an insulated water tank it can hold either heated water or cooled water we have a chiller that we can cool the water in the s Concrete sets up as a function it's a chemical reaction so the hotter it is the faster it sets the colder it is the slower it sets and as we go through the weather cycles from spring to fall to s Wow what's your fuel source for heating? We heat with natural gas we use a technology called direct fire or direct contact hot water heating so t