Ready Mixed Concrete & Mortar
(3 Products)Ready Mixed Concrete & Mortar eliminates hand-measuring errors and delivers repeatable strength, colour, and setting behaviour. Crews skip the mixing phase; concrete arrives ready to place, mortar ready to spread.
What Are Ready Mixed Concrete & Mortar Products?
Ready-mixed concrete and mortar move crucial quality-control steps away from the job site and into a controlled factory environment.
The result is predictable performance, faster construction, and easier compliance - benefits significant enough that, on most projects, traditional site-mixing has become the exception rather than the rule.
Applications
- Structural Foundations: Ready-mixed concrete is engineered to exacting strength classes, making it the dependable choice for footings, ground-beams, and slabs where structural performance must be guaranteed.
- Groundworks & Hard Landscaping: A factory-batched mix delivers the abrasion resistance and uniform finish demanded for driveways, patios, pathways, and shed bases, minimising maintenance over the long term.
- Masonry Construction: Plant-blended mortar supplies consistent bond strength and colour, ensuring clean, even joints in brick, block, or natural-stone work and enhancing exposed elevations.
- Repairs & Renovation: Tailored mixes, whether for repointing heritage brickwork or casting a small plinth, provide precise workability and curing characteristics for durable restoration.
Benefits
- Consistent Quality: Automated plants weigh aggregates, cement, water, and admixtures to exact tolerances, producing concrete and mortar with uniform strength, workability, and colour from one load to the next. This reliability helps designers and site managers meet structural and aesthetic specifications with confidence.
- Time and Labour Savings: Eliminating on-site batching frees crews from handling bulk materials, protecting stock from weather, and maintaining mixers. Deliveries arrive when required, allowing teams to concentrate on placement and finishing and shortening the overall programme.
- Reduced Waste: Because each load is ordered to the exact volume and performance specification, there is minimal surplus material to dispose of. Lower waste translates into reduced material costs, fewer skip charges, and a smaller environmental footprint.
- Tailored Performance: Plants can adjust mix designs, via plasticisers, accelerators, retarders, or air-entraining agents, to meet demanding project criteria such as early strength gain, extended working time, or freeze-thaw durability. This level of fine-tuning is difficult to achieve reliably with on-site methods.
Understanding Ready-Mix Grades
Strength Grades
Concrete is usually classified by the pressure it can withstand after 28 days, measured in newtons per square millimetre (N/mm²).
Common grades like C20, C25, or C30 are selected based on what the structure needs to support, whether that's a garden path or a load-bearing column.
Mortar is graded (M4, M6, and the like) in much the same way concrete is classed, with each number reflecting the mix’s cured compressive strength and its suitability for particular masonry units and exposure levels.
Workability and Setting Time
When it comes to concrete, how it behaves during placement, its workability, matters a great deal. This is often judged by a “slump test,” where the mix is shaped into a cone and the amount it slumps tells you how fluid it is.
A high slump suits flowing pours or pump applications; a low slump is firmer and holds its shape. Mortar, on the other hand, is judged more by its open time (how long it remains usable on the trowel).
Both materials can be tweaked to match job requirements using chemical additives.
Using Admixtures for Better Performance
Plasticisers help the mix stay workable without needing to add more water. When it's cold, accelerators speed things up so the concrete sets faster. In warmer conditions, retarders do the opposite, giving you more time to work with it.
In areas where freezing and thawing is a concern, air-entrainers help the concrete flex without cracking.
Frequently Asked Ready Mixed Concrete & Mortar Questions
Why Should I Buy Ready Made Mortar Over Traditional Cement Mix?
Ready-mixed concrete is crafted with the finest quality materials and under rigorous standards, ensuring that you receive a superior result every time.
Not only does it save time when compared to traditional methods of mixing cement, but it also requires far less labour.
How Long Is Ready Mix Mortar Workable For Until It Completely Sets?
Following the addition of water, quick action is required to lay and level the ready mix concrete. You have roughly 1-2 hours before its workability significantly diminishes; otherwise, you'll be left with a far less malleable product.
What Is The Difference Between Cement and Concrete?
The terms concrete and cement are usually used interchangeably in conversation, but they differ significantly.
Concrete is the rock-like material we're all familiar with - a combination of paste, sand and coarse aggregates (gravel). Upon curing it creates the incredibly strong rock-like mass we recognise today in many structures - both old and new.
Cement, more accurately referred to as Portland concrete, serves as the adhesive that binds aggregate particles together. Cement gives strength and hardness to concrete through a chemical process known as hydration: when it combines with water in the mixture.
In actuality, this process carries on for many years after installation; thus, signifying that ancient structures are even sturdier than their recently-built counterparts!
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