Calcium Chloride Concrete Video

Hi, I'm Tim Carter from AsktheBuilder.com and we are here today getting ready to pour a concrete slab. But we have an interesting situation. It's a little after noon, and it's about 42 degrees. It is going to get colder as the day goes on and we are going to run out of daylight in about 4 hours.

That's the recipe for concrete not to get hard out of the truck. And look what's happening with the truck right now. What you see is the concrete truck spinning the drum rapidly. About 5 minutes ago, the driver put in a 50-pound bag of calcium chloride flakes into the drum. He is mixing it right at the job site. What the calcium chloride is going to do is accelerate the hydration reaction in the concrete, which makes it go from the plastic state to the solid state.

The concrete finishers need that to happen as quickly as possible so they are not here at midnight, in the dark, trying to finish this concrete slab. Calcium chloride, you can add it to concrete to make it set up faster.