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Checking cement, steel and sand as they arrive
The five minutes when a truck is unloading are the only five minutes you have any leverage. Once the material is stacked on your site and the driver has gone, whatever arrived is what you own.
None of the checks below need any instrument. They need somebody standing there who knows what to look at.
Cement
- Manufacturing date. Printed on every bag. Cement loses strength as it sits. Bags more than two or three months old should not be accepted for structural work, and old stock is exactly what a dealer clears onto a site where nobody checks.
- Weight. A bag should be 50 kg. Underweight bags are common enough to be worth weighing a few at random. On two hundred bags, a kilo short on each is four bags of cement you paid for and never received.
- Feel it. Squeeze a bag through the paper. It should feel loose and powdery. Lumps that do not break under thumb pressure mean it has absorbed moisture — reject those bags then and there.
- Storage. Once accepted, it is yours. Stack on a raised wooden platform, away from outside walls, covered. Cement lying on damp ground is money dissolving.
Steel
- Markings. Genuine reinforcement bars carry the manufacturer's mark and grade rolled into the surface, repeating along the length. Unmarked bars of unknown origin have no guaranteed strength, whatever the price.
- Diameter. Check it. A bar sold as 12 mm that is actually 11.4 mm looks identical on site and is significantly weaker — and you are paying by weight for steel you did not receive.
- Rust. A light surface film is normal and harmless. Flaking rust that comes away in scales has already eaten into the bar. Reject it.
- Weigh the load. Steel is bought by weight. If the challan says three tonnes, that is worth verifying rather than assuming.
Sand
- The bottle test for silt. Fill a transparent bottle about half with sand, top up with water, shake, and leave it to stand for a few hours. Silt settles as a distinct layer on top of the sand. A thick silt layer means you are buying mud at sand rates, and it weakens both mortar and concrete.
- Rub it between your fingers. Good sand is gritty. If it feels smooth and leaves your hand dirty, there is too much clay in it.
- Measure the load. Sand is sold by volume and short-loading is easy. Know the tractor or tipper's capacity and check the level in the body before it tips.
Bricks
- Uniform size and shape, sharp edges, no visible cracks.
- Struck together, two good bricks give a clear ringing sound — a dull thud means underburnt.
- Drop one from about a metre onto firm ground. A well-burnt brick survives.
- Count them. Loads are almost never counted, and almost never exact.
The habit that matters more than any of these
Photograph the challan and the unloaded material, on the day, on site. Not for suspicion — for memory. Six months later, when the supplier's monthly bill shows a quantity that does not match what you remember, the argument is settled in ten seconds instead of souring the relationship.
On our sites, no delivery is recorded without a photograph of the challan attached to it. It has ended more disputes than any amount of arguing ever did.
The supplier is not your enemy. But a written record protects the honest supplier too — it is his proof of what he delivered.