It’s not as if bagged concrete was a new idea when I started. There were scientists and architects and engineers who had been writing about it for decades, arguing that it was better than the traditional way of making concrete. But even though they talked about it all the time, no one had found a way to make it work on a large scale, or at a price that would compete with regular concrete.
In my own small company we’re trying to do just that. It’s too early to tell whether what we’re doing is going to be better than other techniques or just different; in either case, we’ll have to keep working at it. And we may just be the first ones to succeed: how many people are out there who want their own bagged concrete but haven’t figured out how to do it themselves? What would happen if there were suddenly lots of people making bagged concrete? Maybe that would drive down the price enough to make regular cement look good again. Or maybe what I’m doing will fail: maybe you can’t make bagged concrete cheaply enough, or maybe there are other problems with it.
I don’t know what’s going to happen: I’m just trying to find out whether this is something I can do on a small scale
Bagging concrete is an example of a very simple technique for generating heat, which can then be harnessed to provide a useful service.
It is also a kind of magic, in the sense that there is no other way to generate heat from cold raw materials and turn it into useful work. I’ve heard a few people say they are not interested in bagged concrete because they think it’s too complicated; but I think the problem is that they don’t understand the magic.
The trick is that bagged concrete uses air as the source of its heat and energy. Normally, you get heat from hot water or electricity, which would require additional equipment and some special skills to manage. But if you make your own hot air, you can use it to make work out of nothing-which is what bagging concrete does.
Bagged concrete is a concept and an idea, not a boilerplate. It is an alternative to the standard repeating-bag system, which is based on the dry mix of cement and sand. Bagged concrete has two advantages over this system:
1. The bagging material can be used to make strong and durable concrete that also looks good.
2. Bagging augments the cement’s compressive strength during the later stages of construction, allowing concrete with less aggregate to be used in compression-bearing walls, for example.
Bagged concrete is a mix of cement and sand in a bag. When mixed, it sets up harder than regular concrete, because the sand and the cement are both minerals. Then you can use it without having to wait for it to dry.
It is also more compact. You don’t need as much volume, so you will put less weight on the foundation of your house or building. Much of the weight savings is not noticeable, but over the long run it could add up to something significant.
Concrete is one of the most useful things we have ever invented. It is used to build roads and buildings and tunnels, to make concrete pipes for our water and electricity, and more.
But there is a problem when you pour concrete into a hole: it can’t go bottom first. When it dries, the inside of the hole is shallower than the outside.
In an ideal world, all holes would be bottom-first. But in practice we can’t always get what we want. So we have to settle for making things that are at least close. And we use bags of concrete to prevent the concrete from spreading out too much when it dries.
We know how to make bags of concrete very well now; they have been around since the 19th century. But they were not invented until 1940, when workers in a Manhattan construction site discovered a way to put up walls with no waste, and quickly became very popular. Before long whole new industries had arisen around them.
Bagged concrete is a way of making concrete faster and cheaper.
It was developed by the Concrete Research Laboratory in the UK, which produces a range of high-tech products. The idea is to make a bag of dry concrete mix that can be squirted into place, so that the finished block will be the same shape as when it went in. It’s not just faster – bags can be made up quickly, and then put on a truck and delivered right away. Bags are also much easier to handle; they don’t need to be mixed and poured into forms like normal concrete does. And because bags are like bricks, you can use them to make up ready-mix walls for buildings.
The main problem with using bags is that they aren’t very strong. The way you avoid this is to build walls out of bags that are filled with mud or Portland cement, which makes them much more solid than bags alone. (Bags have a kind of plastic foam inside, but that doesn’t really help.)
I am not a big fan of modern concrete, which is made of cement and sand. Concrete is cheap to make, and has plenty of uses. But it’s not very good for foundations. It can crack, it can crumble at the edges. When things crack and crumble, they’re more likely to fall down.
The problem is that when concrete is poured into place, the water drains out quickly. In a normal foundation, this is no problem; the water drains out through the bottom of the foundation, where the ground is quite hard. But in a foundation made of porous rocks or soil, this drainage path is blocked by the rocks or soil. The rocks and soil essentially form a sponge: as soon as you pour concrete in place, it fills up with water that can’t drain out easily. This means that over time all the water will begin to leach away from the foundation, making it weaker and weaker until one day it falls down.
This could be a big problem for such things as malls and apartment blocks; rather than having one huge block of concrete that goes all the way down, you want many little blocks so that if one block cracks there will be others nearby that aren’t affected, so you don’t need to patch all those cracks at