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Hi, I'm Tim Carter from AskTheBuilder.com and I want to talk a little bit about bleed water in concrete
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I'm pouring some concrete right here. It's a little trench drain and I just poured the concrete and I know it's hard to see on video
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It's almost impossible, but there's some water, liquid water, that's sitting on top of this concrete
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You might be able to see the reflection of it, you know, in the sunlight. But there's all kinds of, there's just a sheen of water here
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And here's what bleed water is. Okay, let's think about what concrete is made from
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It's made from really four ingredients. It's made from stones, sand, Portland cement, and water
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So what is the lightest ingredient of all four of those? It's the water
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Because think about this. If you take a rock and you put it in water, it sinks to the bottom
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If you dump sand into water, the sand goes to the bottom, and Portland cement is nothing but rock
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It's just powdered shale and limestone, so it's heavier than water. So what happens is when you pour concrete like this the water will naturally kind of come to the surface That called bleed water Well here a mistake you could make
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You do not want to trowel the bleed water into the cement
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You'll dilute the cement at the top of the concrete. And if you live in a cold climate, eventually the top of your concrete slab is going to peel off
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So what do you do? You just leave it alone. believe me the bleed water just disappears on its own. The sun, the wind it'll just take it away
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and then you're going to be able to trowel you know your concrete. So don't trowel bleed water
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back into the concrete. That's a huge mistake. I'm Tim Carter for askthebuilder.com
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