My father, John Carroll, and I specialize in small custom masonry projects and make our mortar in small batches. Adding just the right amount of water to the mix of sand and masonry cement—the key to producing a very good mortar with the right consistency—can be tricky, so recently we tested the Collomix AQiX Water Dosing Unit, a hand-held battery-powered meter that connects to a hose, to see if it would help. Its buttons are reminiscent of a television remote: a pause and play button as its power button, plus and minus buttons for digitally scaling up and down the water you intend to let out, two memory preset buttons, and a function button. Being a German manufacturer, Collomix offers dosing in either liters or gallons. If you use gallons, as we did, the meter can be adjusted in tiny, hundredth-of-a-gallon increments.
Because the AQiX measures the water content precisely (the company claims that the device is accurate to 0.05 quart), the tool can be used to make higher-quality mortar or concrete. More importantly, it does this repeatedly; by putting in the same amount of water for every mix, you can have consistent quality. The trick is in the initial batches—finding the approximate amount of water for the result you want. I recommend using a hose with a splitter for this part; that way, you can attach the AQix to one short length of hose and use the other hose for cleaning up and adding small amounts of water to the first few batches if they aren’t right.
Our normal batch consists of 2 gallons of masonry cement (around a quarter of a bag) to 5 gallons of sand. With dry sand, we found that 1.2 gallons of water mixed into the sand and masonry cement made very good mortar, and with the AqiX, we were able to achieve the same result with every subsequent batch. (For a full bag of masonry cement, you’d need to set the dosing meter to about 4.5 gallons of water.) Because the water was precisely metered, it sped things up, too.
On a recent job, we mixed up 30 bags of concrete, using the AQiX to precisely meter out 2.6 gallons of water for every two bags of concrete. Not having to manually measure out the proper amount of water for each batch saved us a lot of time, allowing us to complete the pour in about two hours. Metering the exact amount of water all at once is much quicker and easier than gradually adding water to each batch until it reaches the proper consistency, especially in larger builds when we make many batches in a day. Price: about $250 online. collomix.us
Photos by the author.
