Material calculators for your yard’s website
One cubic yard covers 324 square feet an inch deep and 81 at four — the question your counter answers twenty times a day. Put the calculator that works it out on your own site, free, in one paste, opening on your material and your depths.
Densities and coverage checked against the published standards · How we check
Why a yard bothers
A customer who works out that they need 6.2 cubic yards orders 7 and orders once. A customer who guesses orders 4, runs short on a Saturday, and either pays a second delivery charge or leaves the job half done and blames the material. The calculator is not marketing; it is the phone call you were going to have anyway, answered before it happens.
What we have, by what you sell
- Gravel, sand, limestone and topsoil — tons and cubic yards
- Concrete — cubic yards, and bags where it is a small pour
- Mulch — cubic yards and bags
- Topsoil and compost — cubic yards
- Hot-mix asphalt — tons
- Pavers — the count, plus base and bedding sand
- Sod — rolls and pallets
- Cubic yards, any shape — the volume itself
- Square footage — the area, before the depth
- Rebar — linear feet and weight
Each carries the coverage tables as well: how far a yard goes at every depth, how many bags make one, the depth each use calls for, and what to add for compaction. Those are the tables your customers ring up about.
Three ways to use it
Link to it
A line on your delivery or products page pointing at the calculator for what you sell. Nothing to install, nothing to maintain, and it is what most sites in this trade do.
Embed it
One iframe that opens on your densities and depths. The builder sets the starting values and gives you the line to paste.
Print the tables
The printables are laid out for a counter or a toolbox lid rather than a screen.
Questions a yard actually asks
- What does it cost?
- Nothing, and there is no account, no key and no rate card. The embed includes one small grey line under the calculator crediting this site and linking to it — that link is the whole price. Delete the line if you would rather not; the calculator still works.
- Will it slow my site down?
- It is one iframe, loaded lazily, so it does not load at all until a visitor scrolls to it. No JavaScript of ours runs on your page, nothing is fetched from a third party, and no cookie is set. It cannot see your visitors or anything else on the page.
- Can it use my densities and my prices?
- The starting values are yours: the builder writes them into the URL, so a yard selling ¾ in crushed stone at 1.4 tons to the cubic yard opens on that rather than on our example. What it cannot do is quote your prices, because a price that goes stale on someone else’s website is worse than no price.
- What if I would rather just link to it?
- That is fine and it is what most of the sites in this market do. A line on your delivery or products page — "not sure how much you need? work it out here" — pointing at the calculator for what you sell. Nothing to install and nothing to maintain.
- Who is behind the numbers?
- Every calculator prints its formula, every step of the arithmetic and the published standard behind it — ACI for concrete, NSSGA for aggregate, the Asphalt Institute for hot mix, NIST Handbook 130 for what is sold by volume rather than by weight. If a figure is wrong, the working is on the page and you can see where.
Something missing?
If you sell something these do not cover — a blend with its own density, a product sold by the pallet — say so and it gets built. The contact address is on the about page.