Mobile batching plant or self-loading mixer: what actually moves

The word mobile is doing different work in the two names, and the difference is the unit of movement. A mobile batching plant is mobile between projects: it is brought in, erected on a piece of ground somebody has chosen, and it then stays on that piece of ground until the work ends. Its mobility is counted in moves per contract. A self-loading mixer is mobile between pours: it drives to the aggregate, loads itself, drives to the form and discharges, under its own power, and repeats that without being re-sited. Four of the six mixers published here carry a declared top travel speed — 0–23 km/h on the SLM-18, and 0–36 km/h on three of the larger models — and the same four declare four-wheel drive. The other two declare neither, so nothing is stated for them. One is re-sited between contracts. The other is re-sited between pours.

A mobile plant is still a plant once it arrives, and everything a plant needs, it needs at your address. It wants a piece of ground level and firm enough to stand a structure on and keep it in alignment. It wants aggregate delivered to that ground and stockpiled beside it, in enough quantity that the plant is not waiting on a tipper. It wants cement, water and power — a supply or a generator sized for the mixer and whatever feeds it. And it wants the one condition that is usually left out of the comparison: something else to carry the concrete from where it is made to where it is placed. A plant produces at one point on the map. The pour happens at another. Barrows, a dumper, a truck or a pump close that gap, and they are a separate piece of kit, a separate operator and a separate queue.

The self-loading mixer answers that list by carrying most of it. Loading is on board: a self-loading bucket is a verified specification on all six mixers published here, and it is the item that takes the separate loader out of the sequence. Water is on board too. Five of the six list an automatic water-fill controller and an external suction pump as standard equipment; the sixth lists a high-capacity water tank with a self-priming system instead. The external pump is the part that matters where there is no plumbed supply, because the machine draws from a drum, a bowser or a standpipe rather than waiting for a connection. Mixing and discharge are on board as well: five of the six list a drum that lifts and rotates through 270 degrees, and four of those declare a drum speed of 16 revolutions per minute.

Weighing is the one function where the answer changes by model, and it is worth being exact about, because proportioning by weight is what a batching plant is bought for. Electronic hydraulic weighing is listed as standard equipment on one model in the range. On four others it sits in the optional list rather than the standard one. On the sixth it appears in neither list, so we do not know whether it can be had on that machine, and we will not infer it from one of similar size. If your specification requires every batch proportioned by weight, that is a line to settle in writing before the order rather than an assumption to carry into it. Which model is which, and what is and is not documented for each, is set out on the model pages for the range.

The two numbers usually set side by side in this argument are not the same kind of number, and putting them in one sentence is how the comparison goes wrong. A plant is rated by what it can produce in an hour. A self-loading mixer has a discharge per load. Five of the six mixers published here carry a declared discharge: 1.0, 1.6–1.8, 2.4, 3.8–4.0 and 4.0–4.5 cubic metres. The sixth carries no declared discharge figure at all, only a drum volume. Across the sixteen mixer configurations in our specification record, fourteen carry a real discharge, and they run from 1.0 to 4.5 cubic metres. That is a per-load quantity. Converting it into an hourly one needs a cycle time, and a cycle time is a property of your site — your haul, your loading face, your queue at the form — not of the machine.

So this site publishes no output per hour, for the machine or for a plant. No manufacturer document we hold states one for any of the six published mixers, which is the whole of the reason. Two related traps are worth naming. A drum volume is not a discharge volume: the SLM-18 has a 2,900 litre geometric drum and a declared discharge of 1.6–1.8 cubic metres, and the gap between those two figures is the mixing action itself. And a model number is not a capacity either — our own specification record carries an explicit caution that the number in a model name is a naming convention rather than a measured drum volume. Take the per-load figure, count the cycles your own job will support, and you will have a better number than any we could print.

Before either machine is compared on capability, it has to reach the work, and that is measured at your narrowest gate rather than argued in a specification. One machine on this site has dimensions from a dimensioned drawing that separates the travelling body from the bucket raised: the SLM-18, at 7.06 metres long, 2.21 wide and 2.58 high travelling. Across all sixteen mixer configurations in our record, ten carry real overall dimensions, and those run 1.60 to 2.30 metres wide, 2.45 to 2.90 metres tall and 4.35 to 7.06 metres long. Nine of the ten come from a supplier's dimension table that does not say which posture was measured. Width is barely affected by posture, so the width range stands; height is affected, so for those nine it is an overall height and not a travelling one. No turning radius is recorded for any mixer in our files, so the turn into your yard is a question these figures cannot answer.

The second question is whether a plant is near you at all, and here there is one indirect measurement worth citing once. Counting business listings within a 50 km radius of ten cities in Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines, the number of construction-company listings per ready-mix-supplier listing runs from 44.5 in Davao to 96.5 in Ho Chi Minh City. Three conditions travel with that figure. These are registrations, not plants and not market size. Coverage differs by country, so comparing two cities in one country is sounder than comparing two countries. And one business can be listed under several categories at once. What the ratio supports is narrow and still useful: in the smaller cities the ready-mix side of the count is very small in absolute terms — fourteen listings around Davao, eight around Makassar, seven around Iloilo — which is the condition this category of machine exists for.

No price appears above for either option, and the reason differs on each side. For a mobile batching plant we hold no sourced price, hire rate or set-up cost from any primary document, and a figure recalled from memory is not a figure. For our own machines, pricing is a commercial decision that has not been made, and our only cost basis is an internal one that would misdescribe what a landed machine costs a buyer anyway. What we can say is what a real comparison would need: a plant quotation against a machine quotation, both landed at your port and both naming the shipping mode; the cost of whatever moves concrete from a plant to your forms; and a cycle count from your own site rather than from a brochure. How a quotation is built, and what is settled before one is issued, is set out on the how-we-work page.