From the beginning of time, concrete has always been made as close to the place it was going to be used as possible. Because the fact is that when you mix cement, water, and aggregate together, 20 seconds later you have concrete. Ready to place, and already starting to cure.

Later in history, companies that produced concrete figured out that they could make more money if they did large batches of concrete in a central location and then take it out to their customers. The problem being, as we said above, as soon as concrete is mixed, it’s ready to use. In fact, if you don’t place it right then it will start curing anyway.

That’s a problem if you want to mix concrete in one location and take it to another.

The way ready mix companies solved that problem was to first call themselves ready mix companies. Because once their concrete was mixed, it was ready to us. So it was a smart marketing move to convince customers that it was a good thing that their concrete was ready. After all, customers didn’t want to pay their crews to sit around waiting for concrete to show up.  Plus customers were paying a hefty premium for the small convenience of getting concrete ready for them to place instead of just producing what they needed themselves in the first place.

The other way ready mix companies figured out to mask the fact that their concrete was already curing on its way to the customer, was to invent drum trucks. Because drum trucks kept the concrete churning, and concrete cant bind together as well if you keep it moving.

Even at that, nobody can fight off the inevitable forever. So if the ready mix folks didn’t get their pre-mixed concrete to customers fast enough, it became evident that the concrete was trying to cure before they even got it. Which became known as a “hot load,” the first time in history that we ever even needed a term for what happens to concrete if you try to trick Mother Nature for too long.

Given all that, some really smart and free-thinking people saw the problem and started working on ways to eliminate it. The biggest challenge being that, by that point, the standard was to mix concrete ingredients by weight. So while they could figure out how to have a single truck carry all the ingredients needed to anywhere somebody wanted concrete and mix it there, how do you make sure you are adding the right amount of each ingredient as a matter of weight?

What they figured out was ingenious. They decided to measure how much volume it takes to equal a certain weight, then to mix precisely that volume for each pour. Technically, they were measuring by volume. (Hence the marketing name “volumetric proportioning.”) But, in fact, they were doing exactly the same thing the standard called for at that point.

Cemen Tech even went a step further. Even though the materials used in concrete don’t really settle enough to make any difference to speak of, Cemen Tech added a way calibrate their systems to make sure the volume they use for a certain weight is dead on, no matter how compacted or loose an ingredient is. In a very similar way to how the pump you buy gas from is calibrated for accuracy.

In fact, Cemen Tech volumetric mixers are easy enough to use that concrete users can make their own concrete for about one-third the cost they are probably paying now.  As well as it being a higher-quality concrete (see this study – link here), never waiting for concrete again, having the exact amount of concrete they need, and finishing projects faster as a result.