How to Bid for Crushing Concrete
Pricing & Methods
How to Bid for Crushing Concrete
Pricing & Methods
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The Size and Nature of the Concrete Crushing Job Affects Your Bidding
Not every concrete crushing job is like another. The size/volume of a job determines the way you would bid on a project:
Large crushing jobs
require big machinery, are highly competitive, and depend on you outperforming the competition in terms of price.
Small crushing jobs
(e.g., a couple of hundred loads of material) can be done with a compact crusher, are typically less competitive, and require you to sell the value of crushing concrete on-site.
Large Crushing Jobs are Often Bid Cost Up
Massive amounts of concrete and asphalt mean much value glued together with cement, steel reinforcement, or bitumen. The cost of crushing the pile of concrete is also considerable. Therefore, contractors try to get the best possible bang for their buck. This means the lowest cost possible per produced ton to maximize their profit on the material sale.
To arrive at a price, you need clarity on all the moving parts required for crushing concrete.
1. Who is responsible for material prep?
Crushing concrete is all about material prep. No matter whether you operate a mobile impact crusher or a mobile jaw crusher you need to pre-process and sort through the material. If you neglect or underestimate prep, you risk downtime, damages, and frustration among your crew and client.
Therefore, you need to communicate clearly who is responsible for prep. If your client is responsible for prep, your contract should state what size he needs to downsize the material to and that you will set oversize pieces aside.
If you are responsible for prep, you must factor in an excavator and concrete pulverizer to preprocess the material. For certain crushing jobs, using a primary jaw crusher before your mobile impact crusher might be worthwhile to reduce wear and maximize production.
If you are responsible for concrete prep, you should consider a full day of material prep for a full day of crushing. This may change depending on the material you need to process. You are losing money if you stop crushing to pre-process some more concrete.
2. Who is responsible for moving the crushed product?
To stockpile crushed concrete, you can either use a wheel loader or a tracked conveyor. If you can’t move the finished material fast enough, you must stop crushing concrete and lose money.
A tracked conveyor is typically more reliable and consistent than a wheel loader. A wheel loader might be required because of logistics or the available room. In this case, you must communicate clearly with your client who provides the loader.
If your client insists on using his loader and operator, you should communicate clearly what size machine is required. Sometimes, contractors keep their weakest machines in their yards, which can slow you down and affect your bottom line.
3. Who keeps the liberated rebar?
When crushing concrete, you end up with a lot of liberated rebar. You should account for having a bin at the job site to collect rebar or discharge the rebar directly into the bin. This can be a nice pocket money at the end of the day. Your contract should clearly state who will keep the liberated rebar and who will bring it to the scrap yard.
How much can one charge?
Making an estimate is difficult if you have no control over the material and don’t know what’s in the pile. If you lack experience estimating concrete crushing jobs, you can keep the material prep and the actual concrete crushing separate.
For the material prep, you could offer an hourly rate for an excavator, operator, and pulverizer, while for the actual concrete crushing, you can offer a cost-per-ton rate.
In your crushing rate, you should factor in:
- crusher wear and fuel costs per hour
- excavator incl, operator and fuel per hour
- conveyor fuel costs per hour
- ground man to support the crusher operator
- bin for collecting rebar
- water trailer for the crusher’s dust-suppression
To bill the crushing job to your customer, you will need a belt scale on the crusher or stacking conveyor to provide proof of your service.
Small Concrete Crushing Jobs Can Be Bid Value Down
When crushing small amounts of concrete, you typically solve a specific problem related to material disposal or available room. Whether you crush stockpiled concrete in a confined yard or on a job site, your client is faced with the problem of getting rid of the material or finding somebody who would come and crush it for him.
Depending on your RUBBLE MASTER Compact Crusher model, you can process large and small amounts of material efficiently because your mobilization costs are low and the production capacity is high.
In this scenario, you need to qualify your customer and understand his problem:
- How many loads does he need to haul away? That’s a fixed cost.
- How much does it cost to dispose of material? That’s a fixed cost.
- What’s the value of crushed concrete? That’s an opportunity cost.
Once you arrive at the figure, you need to get to a price that’s just less than the total of the above costs. You are making money, and your client is saving money. In many instances, the actual cost per ton is much higher than those for big crushing jobs.
Mobilization is Billed on Top
You should add the cost to move the equipment in and out on top of the crushing costs. The beauty of RUBBLE MASTER Compact Crushers is that it takes 15 minutes from trailer to crushing, giving you a competitive advantage over many other crushers that require multiple truckloads and hours of setup and tear down.
The rapid deployment of those machines allows you to be very competitive with large jobs because you have produced several thousand tons of material before others even start, and you dominate smaller job sites where high mobilization costs kill crushing economics.
Minimize Your Risk Through Site Visits and Clear Communication
Every concrete crushing job is different. Bidding requires you to check out the job site to assess the condition of the feed material, environmental factors such as neighbors or how to get in and out, and job site & material management logistics.
You can identify if, e.g., a building was properly dismantled or if everything is thrown into one big pile. If there are a lot of contaminants in a pile, this requires more sorting and prep to avoid major downtime or damage.
In case the concrete pile was buried somewhere you might want to use a mobile scalping screen before your crusher to segregate fines and dirt from the actual concrete to minimize wear and maximize production.
It is also important to communicate clearly what your machine can and cannot handle in terms of rebar and feed size. Add a stipulation that you set uncrushable objects aside to protect yourself from messing around with lengthy prep or damages.
Do you want to learn more about concrete crushing?
For more than 30 years, RUBBLE MASTER has been manufacturing premium concrete crushers that work in more than 110 countries worldwide. With our dense dealer network, we help contractors make more money with materials.
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