4,000 tonnes of certified 6F5 to an Essex solar farm, in ten days
A tight programme, a strict material specification and only one quarry in the region able to supply it. Here is how the job was planned and delivered.
The job
A solar farm in Essex needed access tracks and an internal roadway built to take construction traffic. The material specified was 6F5 capping, and the contractor set a ten-day window for the full 4,000 tonnes to be on site.
Solar sites are almost all access. Panels are light, but everything that installs them is not – and until the tracks are in, nothing else on the programme can start. That is why the aggregate is usually first and usually urgent.
The complication
Two things made this harder than a straight bulk order.
First, the certification. The contractor required documented material meeting the specification, not general crushed arisings sold as capping. That immediately ruled out most of the cheap supply in the region and narrowed the field to properly processed, certified 6F5.
Second, availability. Only one quarry within reach of the site could supply certified material at that grade – and it does not hold 4,000 tonnes of it sitting in a stockpile. Material has to be trained into the quarry, and that requires notice. Order it on the day you need it and the answer is no.
On a volume order with a certification requirement, availability is the constraint, not price. The question to ask before committing to a programme date is not what it costs a tonne – it is how much notice the source needs to have that tonnage ready to load.
How it was delivered
We placed the requirement with the quarry early enough for material to be trained in and stockpiled ahead of the first delivery, then scheduled wagons against the contractor’s programme rather than tipping it all at the front end. On a live solar site there is rarely anywhere to store 4,000 tonnes, and material dropped early gets in the way of the work it was ordered for.
The full quantity went in inside the ten days, with the certification paperwork following the loads.
- 4,000 tonnes of certified quarried 6F5 supplied to specification
- Sourced from the one regional quarry able to meet the certification requirement
- Material trained into the quarry ahead of first delivery to secure availability
- Deliveries phased against the site programme rather than bulk-dropped
- Complete within the contractor’s ten-day window
Why it is worth reading
Essex is outside our core Midlands patch, and we took it because the constraint was sourcing rather than haulage. Being independent means we are not tied to one quarry’s stock position – we go to whoever can actually meet the spec and the date, which on this job was the difference between the programme holding and the programme slipping.
If you have a volume order with a certification requirement and a fixed date, the useful conversation happens before the order, not after it.
Got a volume order with a fixed date?
Tell us the tonnage, the spec and the deadline. We’ll tell you straight away whether it’s deliverable – and what notice the source needs.