Thoughts on tearing out vs riding it out after an accidental calcium chloride pour?

Do not start running jackhammers yet, but get ahead of the paperwork immediatly. The testing lab or QA rep is going to review those batch tickets anyway at closeout, and catching it now gives you leverage that you lose once the flooring goes down. I lived thru this exact nightmare four years ago on a medical office build. Batch plant tossed 2% flakes into a 45-yard pump pour with grade 60 #4 bar over Stego Wrap. Steel spec strictly forbade calcium chloride. I called the EOR sweating bullets, but becasue it was an interior climate-controlled slab with an intact 15-mil vapor barrier, the conditions for an active corrosion cell (continuous moisture, oxygen flow, freeze-thaw cycles) just weren't there.

Instead of demoing, we submitted an RFI owning the mistake and proposed applying a topical migrating corrosion inhibitor—we used Cortec MCI-2020—along with a five-year extended warranty on that bay. The engineer grumbled, charged us a review fee, and signed off on it. 30 yards is a massive headache to chip out of an enclosed retail shell. Pitch the mitigation to the engineer first; you might be surprised how practical they can be when you come to them with a workable solution instead of making them hunt you down.

Honestly, I'd bring in the mini-ex and bust it out this morning while it's still green. Everyone always wants to play the RFI lottery with the EOR, but 2% calcium chloride with embedded rebar and wire violates standard ACI 318 chloride thresholds by a mile. No structural engineer with a functioning stamp is going to sign off on that and carry thirty years of corrosion liability, conditioned space or not.

If you wait two or three weeks for the paperwork shuffle, petrographic testing debates, and the inevitable "tear out and replace" memo, that mud is going to be rock hard. Right now, at two days old, a couple guys with 60-lb Hilti breakers or a rented Kubota with a small hammer can chew thru 30 yards in a single shift without rattling the perimeter grade beams to pieces. Eat the cost of the mix, saw-cut clean margins, pop it out, and re-pour with a proper non-chloride set accelerator like PolarSet by Friday. You burn a couple grand on dump fees today, but you dodge a month-long schedule blowout and massive saw-cutting bills later.

If you try to save it trough an RFI, pitch starving the slab of moisture and oxygen from the top side. We got an engineer to sign off on a similar mess by spec'ing a full epoxy vapor barrier coat of Ardex MC Rapid right over the trench footprint.

Chlorides can't do much without humidity moving through the concrete matrix. Put down Ardex MC Rapid—or Koster VAP I 2000 if your local supply house stocks that instead—and bring the technical cut sheets to the EOR to show you're cutting off vapor drive permanently. It's way cheaper than running breakers and gives them hard data to approve.

Everyone assumes it stays a bone-dry retail shell forever, but have you ruled out what the tenant turnover looks like down the road?

Retail bays get flipped constantly. What starts as a dry boutique turns into a coffee shop, florist, or salon with daily floor scrubbers and wet mopping. Once maintenace water works its way down, conditioned air won't save it.

Also, have you ruled out polished concrete for the final finish? If the architect's spec calls for a grind and polish instead of VCT or tile, pitching a topical sealer won't even be an option.

Back in the late 70s we dumped 50-lb bags of Dowflake right into the truck chute on damn near every winter pour, mesh or not, and plenty of those grocery store slabs are still sitting there flat and quiet. Difference is, the old Type I cements back then had higher C3A content that actually tied up those free chloride ions before they could touch the steel. Today's mill grinds don't bind it up nearly as well.

Before you let the engineer run wild, pull the mill cert on that cement from your batch guy. If your C3A is sitting up around 8 or 9 percent, you've got actual chemistry to show the EOR instead of just begging for mercy.

Before you even call the EOR or grab a breaker, send two of your 7-day field cylinders to the lab for an ASTM C1218 water-soluble chloride test right now.

Half the batch plants running liquid CaCl2 dispensers aren't calibrated worth a damn. You need to verify whether you’re truly sitting at 1.0% to 1.2% chloride ion by weight of cement, or if they shorted the dose. Plus, if that ticket shows a 4,000 PSI mix cutting in 20% Class F fly ash or slag, your free ion count might come back lower than the face value on the ticket. Walk in with actual lab titration numbers instead of guessing off a batch ticket.