Rant: The day my mortar mix went wrong on a big chimney job

Had to rebuild a chimney stack in Denver last Tuesday, and the premix I ordered showed up feeling weirdly dry. I added water like normal, but after an hour it was setting up way too fast, like concrete. Ended up wasting three bags before I called the supplier. They said the batch had been sitting in their hot warehouse for months. Cost me half a day and about $90 in wasted material. Anyone else had a supplier send you old, dried-out mortar mix?

3 comments

3 Comments

elizabethg852mo ago

Was it the kind of dry where you could have just added sand and called it bagged dust? That's brutal, especially on a stack where you can't exactly slow down. Nothing like paying to do the supplier's quality control for them with your own time and money.

vera5142mo ago

Read something about core moisture meters being way more accurate.

terryw672mo ago

Our local lumberyard got hit with a whole pallet of that last year. The real kicker is the moisture meters they use at the mill are only checking surface moisture, not the core of the board. So it passes their check, ships out, and warps like crazy two weeks later in your shop. Makes you wonder if the whole grading system is just set up to move product, not guarantee it works. We ended up having to return over 40 percent of that order, which they fought us on.