Installing a driveway outside your house is one of the huge investments you’ll have to make in your life. And while it does involve a great deal of money during construction, most homeowners don’t really know the exact figure as to how much it cost.
Generally, the cost for setting up a driveway will often depend on specific factors like the size of the area where you want to place the driveway, appearance, specialized functions like a heating feature, and the average cost that driveways contractors are charging in your area.
In any case, if you’re still asking yourself ‘how much concrete do I need to cover my driveway?’, then we suggest you continue reading as we’ll get into the details of this topic in today’s post.
Estimating The Volume Of Aggregate Or Concrete You Need With A Concrete Calculator
When considering how much concrete do you need for your driveway, it’s easy becoming overwhelmed with all the numbers. However, it is absolutely crucial to use concrete polishing techniques in order to protect your newly paved driveway from elements and keep it looking like new for many years to come.
Too many people underestimate how much concrete they actually need to cover a driveway, and when it rains or snows, their cracked and stained concrete becomes impossible to repair. Hence, it is always better to know how much concrete you need than to try to guess how much is needed, because over-topping the amount of concrete on your project will most likely result in water damage, potholes, and cracks on your newly paved driveway.
Determining the concrete you’ll need for your driveway construction project can be estimated with the use of a concrete calculator with measurements in both US standard units (inches or feet) and international units (centimeters and meters).
Most purchases for concrete are measured in cubic yards or 27 cubic feet. So if your driveway project measures 10 ft. by 10 ft. and a depth of 4 inches, that will be more than 1 cubic yard. A single cubic yard when converted into cubic meters is approximately 0.76 cubic meters.
The purpose of the concrete calculator is for you to identify the estimated cost of the materials that you need even though a perfect pour rarely happens in any project.
Here’s how it works:
- Determine the thickness of the concrete you want to have.
- Get the measurements in length and width to be covered.
- Multiply the length of the driveways to the width to get the square foot.
- Convert the inch unit of the thickness to feet.
- Multiply and answer from numbers 3 and 4.
- Convert the answer from number 5 by multiplying it with 0.37 to get the cubic yards.
Essentially, you are solving for the volume of concrete needed and just converting it into cubic yards. And the formula is L x W x H where:
L – length
W – width
H – height/thickness
And in order to know how many bags of concrete are required for your project, you just simply divide the required cubic yards in total by the yield. Use these yields per size of concrete bags:
- 40 lbs. bag can cover .011 cubic yards
- 60 lbs. bag can cover .017 cubic yards
- 80 lbs. bag can cover .022 cubic yards