How to Measure Yardage for Concrete Pricing

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Tim Gipson and I'm going to talk to you about how to measure yardage for concrete and concrete is sold by the yard. So when you are doing a do it yourself project for concrete or for aggregate such as this patio here the first thing you are going to do is you are going to figure out the area that you need to put your slab in. Now most slabs are about four inches thick depending on your application of what you are putting in there it might be thicker but if you are looking at a patio pad or something just about back or a sidewalk then four inches is what you want to calculate for that thickness. Now to get our cubic yards what we have to do in this case is we would, if we wanted to see what is in this patio here we would measure it. This happens to be a 12 X 14 square foot pad so what we would do is we would take 12 X 14 and calculate the square footage for that. Now with the thickness, 4 inches is a third of our foot so whatever we calculate so if we calculated 150 square feet then the total cubic feet would be one third of that so we take the length times the width and get a square footage and then multiply it by the four inches which is one third of a foot and in that case you would get 50 cubic feet. Now to convert that to yards what we have got to do is there is three feet in a yard and of course in a cubic yard it would be three feet by three feet, 3 X 3 is 9 so we would take that 50 square or 50 cubic yards and divide that by 9 so you would get roughly about 4.6, 4.7 cubic yards that it would take to do a patio this size so again to calculate how much concrete you would use for a project is you measure the length, the width to get the square footage and then multiple it by whatever fraction of a foot the thickness is. In other words 4 inches thick would be one third, three inches thick would be one fourth of a foot and six inches thick would be one half of a foot so you get your cubic feet divide it by nine and that will give you your cubic yards for what you need for your project. I'm Tim Gipson and that's how to calculate yards for concrete."