Contractor City Blog

For you people who do estimating there’s now a new option in terms of a touchscreen monitor. Maxwell Systems has come out with of a touchscreen monitor that allows you to do your estimating by touching the screen. You can do digital takeoffs directly from the monitor, you can annotate over computer-generated images, and the adjustable stand lets you find the most comfortable angle to work at. That’s from Maxwell Systems the makers of QuestMX Estimating and Maxwell Systems Estimation Logistics.

As we continue down that a long road to energy independence it appears that our landfills are going to play a more and more important part in that effort. AmerenUE, an electric service company in the greater St. Louis area is teaming up with Fred Weber, an industry leader in the civil, highway, heavy construction, and waste services sector, to build a 15 MW methane generation operation which will supply the electrical needs of about 10,000 homes in that area. These technological efforts are not new. Vermont’s got some along with Delaware, and other places on the West Coast and in the central part of the country. The process for building these is basically a matter of drilling a number of wells in the landfill, connecting these wells together with pipes, and using large turbine fans to move the methane to the plant that is going to burn it to produce electricity. This particular plant at Maryland Heights, MO, is supposed to deliver 6,000 cubic feet of landfill gas per minute, 24 hours a day, and is pulling all that gas out of 120 wells. This is just another example of opportunities coming about in the green sector.

It’s not often I recall Rice Krispy bars, those marshmallowy, super sweet treats that today make my teeth hurt just thinking about them. But in my youth they were definitely on my favorites list.

Today, as I was scanning the trade releases I came across a product that you use with pea gravel and other aggregates to create permeable outdoor surfaces that look kind of like Rice Krispy bars. This is a very interesting system since it promises to cut the cost of hardscaping by up to 45 percent.

This is the Podcast of today’s Post about rugged cell phones, their rugged standards, and another one to consider.

I did a post back on July 15 about a few rugged cell phones that I thought might come in handy for those of you who find the current crop of cell phones to be just a bit lacking in the toughness department.

Not everybody feels this way as evidenced by this quote from the article that inspired that original post. A commenter wrote:

You don’t have to work at construction job sites very long to come to the realization that in many cases there is a lot of material and tools disappearing into thin air. At least that’s how it appears. Because DeWalt makes many of the construction tools in use today the company did some surveys about job site losses. What it discovered was an estimated annual $1 billion dollar drain of construction assets due to theft.

Sixty percent of respondents named tool theft as posing the greatest threat to profitability. Not surprisingly, 77 percent of respondents said they had equipment pilfered at job sites up to five times each year.