Concrete Estimates for Dummies

Concrete slab volume

The drones who wrote for eHow.com in the height of the site's popularity with unqualified "experts" had already fashioned a sort of "niching" before Leaf Group (the current incarnation of Demand Media) ever began parceling out eHow content into weirdly-named websites like Hunker, Cuteness, and Sciencing. The trick was to glom onto as many titles with the same keyword as possible and then pound out all the articles in as short a time as possible. In the case of Larry Simmons, however, it didn't quite work: Larry's third article about concrete, Hunker.com post "How to Convert Square Yards to Cubic Yards in Concrete" was every bit as doofus as the first two...

Larry starts out more or less OK, but fails miserably once he gets to the "how-to" portion of his post. In his DMS-required introduction, Simmons allows that,

"Concrete is sold by the cubic yard, so when you purchase concrete to fill a space, you'll have to know the cubic yardage of that space beforehand."

The notion that you're going to "fill a space" with concrete may be ridiculous, but it is correct that concrete is sold by the cubic yard. What the dimensions of a cubic yard might be, however, Simmons never says. In case you wondered, it's the equivalent of 27 cubic feet; such as a slab 9 feet by 9 feet and 4 inches (⅓ foot) thick. It's highly unlikely, unless you're making your own Jersey barriers, that you'll need to create a chunk of concrete a yard on a side, which is why people wonder about square yards to cubic yards.

According to Larry,

"If you already know the area of the space in square yards, you're more than halfway there. All that the cubic yardage provides is the third dimension of the space..."

We kinda think he got that backwards: the third dimension of the space is what's necessary to convert square yards to cubic yards. Larry says that, to make your calculation, all you do is,

1. "Measure the length and the width of the area ..."
2. "Multiply the length... by the width..."
3. "Convert the square yardage to cubic yards by using the planned depth of the slab. Multiply the area of the slab by the intended slab depth."

First off, the question was how to calculate cubic yards if you already know the surface area, so you wasted the first two steps. Second, you didn't mention the units of measurement. Idjit. No, Larry, your two steps should be, Convert the planned slab thickness to yards: divide thickness in inches by 36 or thickness in feet by 3. Multiply the surface area in square yards by the thickness in yards. Add 5-10% for wastage. Don't forget to allow for the extra thickness of the footings, if any.

And there you go, Larry, instructions written by someone who isn't a Dumbass of the Day.

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