Where the word turns up
You hear it on commercial slabs and on interior pours, usually from whoever is running the placing. A ready-mix truck arrives with a 10 cubic yard load and parks where the site lets it park. If the forms are well inside a building shell, or out across a slab that has already been screeded up to a joint, somebody has to carry the concrete the rest of the way. A buggy is the tool for carrying a lot of it at once.
That is the whole idea. It is a bigger barrow on better wheels, with a motor instead of a back on the powered ones. It changes how many trips the day takes. It does not change what the trips are, and it does not change the fact that people are still moving the concrete.
A buggy needs a runway
What decides whether a buggy is any use is not the buggy. It is the ground between the truck and the forms, because a loaded cart has to cross it over and over without wrecking whatever is underneath the wheels.
That list is easy to satisfy on a big flat commercial site. It is the whole problem on a lot with a grade on it.
- Firm and flat, or planked. Loaded wheels need a surface that does not rut, which on a dirt site means a plank runway laid on purpose.
- A ramp at the form board if concrete has to go over it, with something solid underneath that ramp.
- A path that does not run across the reinforcing. Wheels over mesh and bar shove steel out of position, and putting it back is one more job before concrete covers it.
- A path that does not run across the vapor barrier, or across a subgrade that took somebody a day to get true, for the same reason.
- Room to turn around and keep coming, because the trips do not stop until the truck is empty and there is usually another truck behind it.
Why the word comes up less on a Blue Ridge house lot
Every one of those conditions is simple on a large flat site and awkward on a residential lot in this county. Lots here are rarely flat and rarely square. The way to the forms is often a narrow side yard, a gate with a latch post in the wrong place, a bank falling away behind the garage, or a stretch of lawn and beds you would rather nothing loaded crossed at all.
So on the work we do the concrete usually travels one of three ways instead. Straight off the chute where the truck can reach the forms, which is the simplest answer and the one we recommend whenever it is true. A couple of barrow loads to reach a corner the chute comes up just short of, which is normal work on an ordinary pour. Or through hose from our trailer line pump when the forms sit somewhere a loaded truck has no business going. Which of those three suits your pour is its own conversation, and there are pages on this site that work it through properly.