Basics: How to Prep, Use, and Clean a Concrete Pump

We recently found this really nice video from Odell Complete Concrete and wanted to publish it here on the blog. We recommend you check out their channel, there are some cool videos.

Hello and welcome back to the Odell Complete Concrete Channel. My name is Timothy Odell and today I’m going to be showing you guys how to prep, use, and clean a concrete pump. Right now, what we are doing is priming the concrete pump with slurry. We use about five gallons of water to run through the hose, to clean any excess buildup that may have been left over from a previous job and run that through the concrete pump hose, get rid of it right into the wheelbarrow, as you can see right there. And once we get it all ready, we just drop it down right into the forms and start filling up the job with the concrete. The reason why we use slur or oil or whatever you prefer to run through the hose is to help keep the concrete all together. Without using any slurry or oil, you’re most likely going to get a blockage in your concrete pump, which can be very dangerous.

Moving on to the next point. As you can see, our concrete pump guy has the hose between his legs as he’s pumping out the concrete. I would always prefer my concrete pumper or whoever is pumping concrete to do this. It’s not only safe, but really helps you keep control of the concrete pump so you’re not splattering all the concrete everywhere. And also, as you can see, our concrete pump guy has a small remote on the side. As you can see, he just turned the concrete pump off. And that’s always very, very helpful and useful to have on a job if you don’t have that and you’re a single concrete pump guy, you don’t have some guy manually operating it on the other end, you’re going to have a really hard time getting any job pretty much as a concrete pumper. So as we finished the concrete pump and just so you guys know we are using A and B Concrete Pumping. Great company, great guys.

And also, I wanted to let you guys know, I think that the guy standing on or was standing on is called a reducer. It helps pretty much connect the output of the concrete pump to the hose and helps reduce the stress on the hose when pumping. And what the guy’s hooking up right now is called a washout hook. I believe they are called. And right now he’s just putting his couplings together and clips onto the washout hook. And they’re going to just pump it right back into the concrete truck, pretty much to just clean out all their hoses. And they’re strapping it down because back in the day, these things, or I mean they’re still very strong and powerful, but if you don’t strap it down, the wall hook or the washer hook is just going to shoot right into the air like a rocket. And that is very dangerous as well.

So you can see they’re getting rid of all the excess concrete on the shoots of the cement truck. And what they’re going to do is just fill up the hopper with water, getting rid of all excess material inside of the hoses. And they have about six, I think, buckets of water ready to just drain to the hopper to help get all the excess material out of the hoses.

They really know how to clean their concrete pumps. So yeah, there they go dropping in the buckets of water to help get all the excess material out. In all dreams I pretty much ride back from in the concrete truck.

Here’s a closeup on the concrete truck or concrete pumper. A and B Concrete Pumping. And once you got all the hoses clean, you just get them right back into wherever you store them. Couple of things I forgot to mention was before using your concrete pump, you should always check your fluid levels, such as your oil or hydraulic fluid. Go over your concrete pumps, engine, check the water box and make sure the machine is greased. Just basic stuff like that before concrete pumping and making sure everything is prepped and ready to go.

So right now, I’m going to be giving guys a look towards the back and how to clean the outports of the concrete pump. It’s very important to always clean out your couplings and clips too or clamps. Your couplings and clamps, always clean those out after a job.

Make sure no concrete or anything like that is in there. And then right now they’re just cleaning the outports of the concrete pump, making sure no excess material gets built up in there because concrete pumps and making them last is all about how well you can maintain them. So if you’re a concrete pumper, make sure you’re on the ball every time with cleaning your concrete pump.

So they are just draining all excess material out of each port. And just so you guys know and have an idea of how concrete pumps work or my understanding of how they work is they basically are powered by two cylinders. And one of the cylinders basically sucks the concrete through the cylinder and the other one pumps it out through the outport study you are looking at right now. And that’s the basic understanding of how a concrete pump pumps concrete.

So they’re just going to go through each one of these and just clean them all out. But anyways guys, I hope you guys enjoyed the video, learn something, like, subscribe, give it a thumbs up, ask questions. I’m always willing to help anyone out that has any questions on our videos. And stay tuned for more videos guys. I really appreciate it. Thank you and have a great day.