57. Proper Washdown Procedure

Andrea and Griff are joined by Sheldon to talk through proper washdown procedure after a truck has been loaded. Also: conserving diesel, concrete pumps, and the march madness pool.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:10

Welcome to Load It, the Hahn Ready Mix podcast with Andrea Meyer and Griffin Hahn.

SPEAKER_02 0:14

How's it going today?

SPEAKER_00 0:15

I'm good. How are you?

SPEAKER_02 0:16

Doing very well. You didn't like you gotta like finish saying who's here with us every day.

SPEAKER_00 0:22

Oh every time. Well, producer Lex uh oh, he's half in the room, half in, half out.

SPEAKER_02 0:27

Hi, goodbye. And Sheldon's here with us.

SPEAKER_00 0:31

You usually announce the special guest.

SPEAKER_02 0:32

Good morning. Hi, Sheldon. Hello.

SPEAKER_00 0:35

You have to have a job.

SPEAKER_02 0:36

This is your third or fourth time on the podcast. I think four. Four. Most common guest by far. Wow. I didn't realize I had that status.

SPEAKER_00 0:45

By popular demand.

SPEAKER_02 0:46

By popular demand.

SPEAKER_01 0:47

I have doubts. I have strong doubts.

SPEAKER_00 0:49

And by popular, I mean the two of us, by you. Awesome. Well, I have all kinds of announcements today.

SPEAKER_02 0:56

I have a lot of announcements too.

SPEAKER_00 0:57

That's good. This is a great week. I like it.

SPEAKER_02 1:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:05

I did something crazy yesterday.

SPEAKER_02 1:07

That's new and different? Yes, you did.

SPEAKER_00 1:11

I turned a notification on in our system to alert me when trucks are sitting in the yard for more than 20 minutes.

SPEAKER_02 1:19

Okay. Have you done nothing else but look at notifications then since then?

SPEAKER_00 1:24

I got no sleep, but emails have just been uh off the hook. So I'll tell you that I've received over 30 emails so far today. It's 9 a.m. on Friday. Received over 30 emails so far. So how many hours of idling in the yard do you think we've wrapped up already today?

SPEAKER_02 1:41

Just today. It is uh 9:30 in the morning.

SPEAKER_00 1:46

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 1:46

We have about 50 trucks on the road today. I'm gonna guess we have 30 hours.

SPEAKER_00 1:52

56 hours of idling in the yard.

SPEAKER_01 1:55

Well, I was gonna go in the hundreds.

SPEAKER_00 1:58

It's a lot. And a lot of them were first thing in the morning, right? When people come in, they think they must clock in, turn the truck on, and then sit there and you know do their pre-trip or whatever. If you're gonna be in the yard for more than 15 minutes and the weather allows for it, and you know you, you know, either you're deadhead or you get where you're going, turn the truck off. If diesel costs are just skyrocketing. Yes. We can't, we can't. And the system also tells me the dollars associated with those 56 hours, and I don't even want to depress everyone by bringing that up. But every dollar that we're spending on diesel is a dollar we don't have somewhere else. So everybody keep that in mind. It's in everybody's for us, for the customers, and even for us as consumers, like those diesel costs trickle down to everyone everywhere.

SPEAKER_02 2:44

So well, and we've also talked about the maintenance aspect of keeping the trucks idling, that the new engines in particular don't like to idle. They need to burn hot to operate right. So yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:56

And this applies to everybody the mixers, the haulers, pickups, everything. Turn them off.

SPEAKER_02 3:02

All right, it's my turn to do an announcement, or do you got you want to knock through all your?

SPEAKER_00 3:06

Keep going.

SPEAKER_02 3:06

Okay. We uh had an incident that I we've meant to bring up the last couple of episodes, we keep forgetting. Um, but an important safety reminder when we're on a job where uh we have a pump, it's really critical for a number of reasons to keep the the hopper on that pump with concrete in it. We can't let it run dry. The first and most important reason is if they have a rubber hose on the end of that pump and it has a dry stroke, the pump does, it can make kind of a shockwave effect that makes the pump jerk and fly on the the hose at the end of the pump. We had that happen on a job. We're lucky nobody got hurt. Um, but we ran the pump dry twice and both times the hose really kind of uh flew out of their hands, and it could have been a bad situation. The other side to that is you know, when you run it dry, it shoots the concrete up and makes a huge mess on the hopper side of it. So when we're on a pump job, let's do everything we can to make sure we're keeping a close eye on. I know that sometimes they start and stop, but do what we can to keep the hopper full because it's important.

SPEAKER_00 4:12

Good. Another little reminder that I have is just the general idea of accuracy with what we're doing. We ask for a lot of little inputs throughout the day from everyone when you're doing your pre-trip, when you're getting fuel, when you're reporting your leftovers, when you're, you know, entering uh the tons for the haulers, just a lot of little inputs. And it's easy to make a mistake. You know, everybody's trying to be efficient and and moving through, and it's easy to make mistakes. But when you put all of that together, we're actually using that data for a lot of business decisions that are important. So when fuel numbers are off, or when the tons don't add up for inventory, or when your leftovers are, you know, you say 0.1 or 0.25, and you actually have a whole yard of concrete there. Yeah. Um, there's decisions being made based off of that information that has a bigger impact to the bigger picture. And I know in the midst of doing your own job, it it feels like something small and minor, but it actually is important. And we appreciate everybody just taking the time to make sure that they're entering everything as accurately as they can.

SPEAKER_02 5:19

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 5:20

Even you.

SPEAKER_02 5:21

Yes. Another announcement I had was we're coming off winter, and hopefully, hopefully tonight will be our last freeze. I might be naive thinking that the air that is in all of the trucks is less effective after it is froze.

SPEAKER_00 5:38

So are you talking about air in the tires? Like we got to switch out our winter air with the summer air.

SPEAKER_02 5:46

Oh, okay. We need to switch those out. Um, so get with Lex or uh we'll get set up. We've done it before. We've had uh a small tote of the air at the builder's office for one, or or just go talk to your plant manager and say you need to switch out some air and we'll get it to you. Um but we need to switch out that air with new stuff that hasn't froze to have the best efficacy going forward. And then I have another very exciting announcement, which is our update to the March Madness pool.

SPEAKER_00 6:18

It's very exciting.

SPEAKER_02 6:19

Very exciting. I know I've already lost.

SPEAKER_00 6:21

Oh no.

SPEAKER_02 6:23

Yeah, Sheldon, I hate to tell you, but you're yeah, you're in the bottom 10.

SPEAKER_00 6:27

Are you picking based on team colors or mascots?

SPEAKER_01 6:30

No, actually, I think I think I still have Arizona to win on one of my brackets. So there is a possibility I could win it all if you look at the potential points. Yeah. But I have doubts. Yeah. Strong doubts. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:44

As long as Griffin doesn't win, I don't care.

SPEAKER_02 6:45

Well, that's that's true. You're you're actually in a decent spot, I think. If nope, never mind.

SPEAKER_01 6:50

Everything goes perfect and I cheat.

SPEAKER_02 6:53

Yeah. Okay, so we had 63 people in the pool this year, which is great. And unfortunately, Florida took a terrible loss, which really hurt my chances.

SPEAKER_00 7:02

We're all sad about it.

SPEAKER_02 7:04

For the moment, however, winning the pool with 65 points, it's tied Carol Morrissey and yours truly sitting in first place, uh, with Ed Morrissey in third place with 62 points. So those are the top three, but the highest potential is Ed Morrissey and Carol Morrissey are first and second for potential points. Oh, sorry, I said that wrong. It's actually Ed Morrissey and let's see, Brian Stelley and Eric Van Spraybrok from Rouse.

SPEAKER_00 7:38

Those two guys.

SPEAKER_02 7:41

Yeah, they're they're next on potential points. So yeah, so it should be it should be fun. And that that is this timestamp is the halfway point of the Suite 16, I guess, is when these standings are out. So on Monday.

SPEAKER_00 7:55

Everything can happen, right?

SPEAKER_02 7:56

Yeah, on Monday after the Elite Eight, we'll send out an update.

SPEAKER_00 8:00

With people coming back to work, one issue that we always run into is parking. I know it's a pain in the butt to park over here by the office, but that is what we have to do for everybody's safety and for you know, protecting your personal vehicle. Please uh make sure you're parking on the office side and not over by the QC lab. And then finally, I just wanted to appreciate some folks who are coming back and pointing out, you know, over the winter things change, things get dried out or frozen or whatever, and different things get broken and don't work the way they're supposed to. And we've already had, you know, a lot of proactive drivers pointing that out, you know, sending messages through Digital Fleet or calling me directly or stopping in or telling the plant manager whether it's you know, hoses or potholes or whatever things are in our way and making it inconvenient for us. The only way we know to fix them is if people report them. And we've had a lot of that already. And I just wanted to appreciate it and say, keep it up.

SPEAKER_02 8:56

Cool. Who are some of those people? Let's give them.

SPEAKER_00 8:59

Uh well, Michael Kilgore. You know, that can go both ways. He's not afraid to talk, uh, but he has pointed out a few things. And Michael Cole, I had a good conversation with him this week. And Dan Berthoud, of course. The guy can't stand to see trash in the yard. So I love him taking a proactive approach and taking care of that for us.

SPEAKER_02 9:17

Yeah. Great. Good job, guys. Well, should we jump into the topic today? Sure. All right. Well, Sheldon, we brought you on as kind of a subject matter expert here. Today we're going to talk about proper washdown procedure. So I think something that we have to do every single load. And I think overall, our team, we do a really good job at this. But if there are finer points or consistency that we can gain having everyone do it the same, it's just good to go over it. Uh, I think our focus will be mostly on, you know, washing down after you've been loaded, but we can also talk about after you've unloaded on the job site and end-of-day washdowns as well, if we have some time. So yeah, should we jump in? Sheldon, what do you got?

SPEAKER_01 10:01

Okay. So uh first off, after you get loaded, uh, you get get buzzed out or you get the light and you pull up to the uh inspection rack, your first instinct is to turn your water on if you don't have say if you're not at builders or or river plants or some of the plants don't have water available, so you have to use the water on the truck. When you turn your water on, you need to physically go to the valve at the back of the truck that would add water to the drum. You do need to make sure that that is off when your water is turned on so that you can control how much water actually goes in your drum. Well, that's like rookie mistake number one.

SPEAKER_00 10:41

And this is supposed to be a spring valve, right?

SPEAKER_01 10:44

It's supposed to be a spring valve. Occasionally, maybe I don't know if it's an inventory thing and sometimes they have no choice and they put a regular valve on there. Uh, we've already ran into it a couple times this year where no spring valve, and surprise, we've ruined a load.

SPEAKER_00 10:57

Yeah. If you happen to be someone who does not have a spring valve, get your truck to the shop.

SPEAKER_01 11:02

Yes, we will get that switched out. It's got to be a spring valve. But those spring valves, especially in the wintertime, sometimes stick. So the rule is you turn your water on, you go put your hand on that valve and make sure it's closed. That's it's pretty simple. Just a couple steps down the distance of the truck. So you're pulling up to the inspection rack, you got water available. First thing you should do if you're at a dry batch, rev your truck up. Yeah. You need a good four to five minutes of revs, 70 revs. 70 revs.

SPEAKER_00 11:27

Fully mixed. Yeah. Before you I wish Darren was here to do it in the proper accent.

SPEAKER_01 11:32

Let me let me let me try and do it. The fully mixed. Um you you shouldn't add water to the to the load until it's fully mixed. Right. So that that's an important note. Get your ticket while it's reving up. While it's while it's revved up, you got your ticket. You'll and look at your ticket and see if you have to add any fiber color while you're getting your ticket. If you have any questions, you can communicate with the disp with dispatch or with your batch or find out if there's special directions, you know, if it's a certain type of fiber or something you have to put in there. Um, that's when you want to add your fiber because you're already mixing the truck up. On a on a wet batch, you don't have to rev your truck up unless you're adding color or something.

SPEAKER_02 12:10

Yeah, we we actively don't want to rev it up unless you are adding uh something to the mix, because then all we're doing is is heating up the concrete and increasing the the rate at which the concrete will set. And most of the time in in the summer season, anyway, we that we don't want that. So I would say at a at a wet batch, do not rev it up unless you need to add fiber or color or water or whatever.

SPEAKER_01 12:34

Right. Now, communicating with the batcher, that might take a moment, but while you're revved up, I'm just gonna pretend we're at a dry batch. While it's revved up, you're gonna you're gonna rinse down your hopper. Everything, there's stuff sticks in the hopper, you got to rinse that down in there. You're gonna rinse your fins while you're up on top. You can important note, you have to actually climb the ladder or go up the inspection rack. You have to put your eyes on the load while you're in there.

SPEAKER_02 12:58

Every single load. You're gonna hear that a couple times today.

SPEAKER_01 13:02

Um you you gotta put your eyes on it because things happen sometimes. I mean, we I remember a couple years ago, somebody came in and said, Hey, you need to look at this load. It was rock soup. There was no cement in the load because the cement chute in the plant had plugged up. He caught that.

SPEAKER_00 13:18

What if I've been doing this for like a hundred years and I'm super confident in my slump meter and I know what concrete's supposed to sound like? Do I still have to look at the load?

SPEAKER_01 13:27

Is your name on the side of the truck?

SPEAKER_00 13:30

Even then.

SPEAKER_01 13:31

Yeah, that's the only exemption. If your name's on the side of the truck, you do what you want.

SPEAKER_02 13:35

No, that that goes back to the complacency talk that you missed last week. But it's it's about treating every load or every task like it's your first time, right? So um double checking. So yes, so eyes on every single load. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 13:52

I mean, it what I try to work with all of our new folks and even our intermediate folks, you have to build a routine. And if you build it into your routine, you're gonna it's gonna feel like you're walking backward, going down a ladder and you missed a rung if you if you forgot to do something. Putting your eyes on the load is important.

SPEAKER_02 14:09

But Sheldon, what if it's only like a yard? Or what if it's first thing in the morning, it's dark outside. It's cold outside and the concrete's been heated and it's it's steam.

SPEAKER_01 14:20

There's an there's an amazing thing about these trucks is you can you can put the drum in re reverse and you can back it out and stop it before it runs out, and you can put your eyes on the load. You can look at it.

SPEAKER_00 14:32

What if I'm hauling the same mix over and over to the same job and I know we've got it dialed in.

SPEAKER_01 14:38

Look at the load. Yeah, every load. Yeah, because anything can go wrong. So you're communicating, you're rinsing down from the hopper, you rinse your fins. The fins that are up at the top of the drum are important to rinse off because you can get buildup faster on those down further into the drum. The concrete keeps those clean while you're while you're hauling through the day.

SPEAKER_00 14:57

If you have any questions about buildup on fence, call Zach and Muscatine. He's really intimately familiar with that situation right now.

SPEAKER_01 15:03

Or dubs and hawks.

SPEAKER_00 15:05

Yes, yes.

SPEAKER_01 15:05

Or Jill. Jill slid down in there and did a couple of things.

SPEAKER_00 15:08

Too many people that have been working on cleaning those up this winter.

SPEAKER_01 15:11

Um, it's not fun chipping trucks unless you really enjoy hard, difficult things to do. And then after you do that, you're gonna start from the top down. If you're if you're rinsing off your drum, you want to do it at the top. You don't want to stand on the ground and aim the water up because all you're doing is splattering the stuff on everything else. If you're up on top, spray down, rinse down, and then work your way down. You're gonna go down the A-frame, you're gonna go down your collection hopper, shoot, do your uh your bridge master, and then after you're done with all of that, you're you're good to go. Make sure you have good directions. But the big thing is it's top down so you're not spraying and putting the paste from the cement into the truck. You're not pushing the concrete into the truck. You want to push it away from the truck. I have a very good video of Larry doing a rinse down after loading and a rinse down after after unloading. If anybody would like, I'd be happy to share it with them.

SPEAKER_02 16:07

Yeah, I think the the idea here is be thorough with getting the concrete that might have or any cement paste or anything off the truck right then when it's easy to get off because it gets so much more difficult later on.

SPEAKER_01 16:20

Yeah, water is way easier than hammers.

SPEAKER_02 16:22

So taking uh a few extra seconds to kind of methodically work down the truck, like you said, get the hopper, the fins, collectors, the drum, the pedestals, the bridgemaster axle, make sure the rollers are clear, get the bumper, you know, all those things all the way down the pivot assembly. Let's let's make sure they're all clean. Um, and that can be done quickly, especially if the truck is clean. It starts to get really hard if the truck is dirty. But if you do it every single load and you stay on top of it, it's pretty easy. I I I watch, you know, somebody like Josh McDaniel, I watch him wash down. And it's not like he takes a great deal of time, but he's methodical about how he does it. He pays attention, he doesn't let that concrete build up anywhere. And that makes every single load easier for him to keep clean. So um there's a there's a few fellas out there that have the OCD that we love. Yes, yeah, yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_00 17:20

I really like what you guys are saying about making it uh routine and automatic, but I do think it's important that you can't just check out while you're doing it because unfortunately there's unique situations. Every plant, I think the water flow is just a little bit different. And so what you're doing in Muscatine and what you're doing in Eldridge, if you're loading out of a different plant, you got to pay attention to how much water you're using and how much of that's going to the drum and like still, you know, uphold the integrity of the concrete.

SPEAKER_01 17:49

Yeah, absolutely. Uh on a safety note, this is I don't know if we talked about it. We had that near miss with Brian Woods.

SPEAKER_00 17:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:56

He was actually on his ladder uh washing down at a job site, and one of the other drivers pulled up next to him, couldn't get in position, right? Pulled too close, too fast. Too close, too fast. Shoots were on the back, and Woods had a near miss. He uh he could have gotten hurt really bad. So one of the other things we really should be paying attention to is three points of contact while we're up on top and being aware of what's going on around you. Like you said, don't don't mentally check out.

SPEAKER_00 18:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:25

Not that Woods did that.

SPEAKER_00 18:26

No.

SPEAKER_01 18:27

He was very mentally checked in.

SPEAKER_00 18:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 18:30

Well, another thing I think that's important is you talked about getting your ticket and communicating with the batch person, but looking at the directions on the ticket. I know we have turn by turn, and that is a great tool. I'm glad we have it, but sometimes there are specific directions from the contractor that'll be on the ticket. And so that is your chance to look at that. You know, it may say you have to come in from the north. And, you know, we work on construction sites. So there's roads closed all the time where we're working. And if it says you got to come in from the north and you come in from the south, I mean, I've been on jobs where that's a 20-minute detour to get the truck around and the contractor is waiting for 20 minutes for the driver to back up, get around uh wherever, you know, to the next open road, maybe fighting through traffic to get to the job. So we have to be paying attention to the specific directions on the ticket. And if your ticket directions and the turn-by-turn directions on the tablet don't jive, follow the ticket every single time. That is the proper way to do it. But it's a great time if you have any questions about how to get somewhere or uh the directions on the ticket don't make sense to you. It's a great time to talk to the batch person to say, hey, you know, this doesn't make sense, or, you know, how should I do this? Or can you show me on a map, whatever, um, to make sure that we uh are getting to the job site in a timely fashion and in the right place they want us. The other thing that comes into that is when we batch, you know, a lot of big orders, we are we're batching on a on a spacing that the contractors requested. So let's say it's five minutes every five minutes they want a truck. Well, if every other truck goes, let's say there's Route A is what the ticket directions say, and there's another way to get there, but it may be four minutes longer. And if they're wanting a truck every five minutes and every other truck takes the wrong way, then they're gonna have a four-minute gap every single time. So it's important for us to take the same route. And that is um either the turn by turn or if there are directions on the ticket, take that.

SPEAKER_01 20:36

Yeah. Something else we can add to this, um, since we're talking about water and washing down out on the job sites, while you're washing down, be aware of what kind of mess you're making. If you need to put a bag out, put a bag out. Make sure the shoots are hitting the bag when you're rinsing down. A couple of times last year we ran into a situation where the driver did finish pulling, finished with their concrete, they pulled up out of the way, they start rinsing down and they're not paying attention to where that water is going, which happened to be right into where they just poured the concrete. And that's not great. It's not a good way to make friends with people that are out in the sun working hard. And then also at the end of the day, when you're washing out, uh, maintaining a clean drum is important. On the inside as well, do not dump concrete in the pit. But it when you get your wash out at the end of the day, it only takes about 250 gallons of water to wash your drum out.

SPEAKER_02 21:28

Yeah. You want to have your drum revved up. That's kind of the sweet spot. A lot of people think that more is better and it's really not. It's kind of like if you uh, I don't know if you ever got like a liquid IV or one of those different powders, you put it in a water bottle. If the water bottle's completely full and you shake it up, it doesn't really mix it up real. You have to have enough space to get good mixing action. That that 250 gallons of water is kind of the sweet.

unknown 21:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:52

I think about it like a washing machine too, like you you don't fill it all the way up with water when you wash it close.

SPEAKER_02 21:58

Yeah. Yeah. More clothes. My wife tells me I put way too much clothes.

SPEAKER_00 22:02

Yeah, it can't be full.

SPEAKER_02 22:03

I totally do that. I just think that she should be happy that I'm washing clothes at all.

SPEAKER_00 22:08

So But we want them to actually be clean, is the thing.

SPEAKER_01 22:12

Oh, okay. But one of the one of the things I think is getting overlooked is after you've gotten your 250 gallons while you're getting it and after, have the drum revved up because that splashing around is doing the cleaning. Yeah. When you go to dump it, if the water's still really gray, you might need to go do it again. You know, if it's really dark, I mean, if if you're washing out color, you wash until the color's gone. Yeah. Same thing for the concrete, because then you're going to have a lot less buildup through the year.

SPEAKER_02 22:38

The only other point I'd say is jumping back to end of a load if you're washing out, is not only do we need to make need to make sure that the water doesn't go onto the job sites, but doesn't go into any gutters. The city of Davenport loves City streets, streams. Yeah. The city of Davenport loves to accuse us for every gray water incident that happens. Doesn't matter if it's a different company, doesn't matter if we're involved in the job or not, or if it was the contractors cleaning their tools hours after we were there, doesn't matter. They're gonna blame us and write us a citation. So um we need to make sure that we are always doing the right thing so that we don't give them any more reason to do that than they can come up with on their own. The other thing I wanted to note on washdowns was that this year so far, from the time the truck's got loaded till it leaves the yard, we're averaging about seven and a half minutes. And last year we were about six minutes and fifty seconds. So that's a lot of time if you think about how many loads we have in a year that go out. Um, but I know that a lot of our more efficient folks can do all the things we just talked about, every cleaning everything, looking at directions, looking at the load in five minutes. And I really think that that's a great target for us is to shoot for doing that, the whole washdown procedure in five minutes and getting out of the yard and onto the job site.

SPEAKER_00 24:04

Very good. I like it. I love a tactical podcast.

SPEAKER_02 24:07

Yeah. Yeah. So hopefully that was helpful. I mean, I think for most of our people, this is all review. Uh, this is all stuff that we do right most of the time. Excellence is in the consistency, right? So doing this every single time is important and will will bring results.

SPEAKER_00 24:25

Very good. Thanks for listening to Loaded, the Hon Ready Mix podcast. Remember to send us any questions you have or topics for future podcasts and share this with your friends.

SPEAKER_02 24:34

Adios.