Choosing a Landscape Material Calculator for the Job

Choose your material

The choice on this page is not really which tool. It is whether the job is one layer or two, because that decides how many calculations you run before you have a number worth ordering against.

A cube of mulch and a cube of crusher run, five times apart

Picture a cubic yard as a three foot cube. Shredded mulch fills that cube at about 600 lb. Crusher run fills the same cube at about 3,000 lb. The volume is identical and the tonnage is five times different, which is exactly why a tool built around one material gives a different answer to a general aggregate calculator.

The site's published weights: shredded mulch approximately 600 lb a cubic yard, or 0.30 tons. Blended garden soil about 2,000 lb (1.00), screened topsoil about 2,200 (1.10), fill dirt about 2,400 (1.20). Mason and washed sand, paver sand and river rock at 1 to 3 inch all come in at about 2,700 lb (1.35). Driveway and walkway gravel, pea stone and the #57 and 3/4 inch stone all come in at about 2,800 lb (1.40). Stone screenings, #4 stone and ballast are about 2,900 lb (1.45). Crusher run, road base and paver base are about 3,000 lb (1.50). RipRap is about 3,100 lb (1.55).

All figures are approximate, and there are nine of them behind fourteen tools. Three tools share the 1.40 line and three share 1.50, so whichever of a group you open, the tonnage is the same. The tools earn their separation on depth rather than on density: an inch of bedding sand, twelve inches of clean stone in a trench, four to six of loam under grass, two to three of mulch on a bed.

Drives and pads: run the base and the surface separately

Size the compacting layer in the road base calculator or the crusher run calculator, then size the surface course in the gravel calculator or the stone calculator. Add the tonnages afterwards. A new drive is generally built around six inches of material in total, and a paver patio takes a compacted base plus exactly one inch of bedding sand, which the paver base and paver sand tools handle as two separate layers.

Drainage, banks and the tools for washed stone

For pooled water, a saturated trench or a French drain, allow twelve inches or more of clean stone and size it in the stone calculator. Riprap goes over fabric in layers twelve inches and deeper, and the rip rap calculator applies the heaviest of the published weights. Decorative beds and dry creek work belong in the river rock calculator, and play areas in the pea gravel calculator, where a fall zone wants nine to twelve inches.

The three that sell by the cubic yard rather than the ton

Thin grass takes four to six inches of screened loam through the topsoil calculator. Raised beds run through the soil calculator at four to twelve inches depending on the bed. A grade change uses fill dirt for the bulk with loam kept for the top four to six inches, and beds take two to three inches from the mulch calculator. Bedding sand has the sand calculator.

Depth is the input that ruins estimates on Massachusetts ground

A thirteen by eleven patio at six inches takes three times the stone of the same patio at two.

Ground varies enough here, from dense till in one town to lake-bed silt in the next and deep outwash sand on the Cape, that no single depth figure belongs on a hub page. The depth sits on each material page instead.

What the tools ask for and what comes back

Choose rectangle, circle, or multiple areas up to five. Enter length and width in feet, or a diameter. Enter depth in inches, anywhere from 0.25 to 24. Pick the material, and tick the five percent option for compaction and spillage on anything that will be packed down.

The arithmetic is length times width times depth in inches divided by 12, all divided by 27 for cubic yards, then multiplied by the material weight for tons. Results come back as cubic yards, tons and cubic feet, and can be emailed. Then open the product page, set a quantity and pick a delivery date, and read what the truck needs at the drop spot before the load arrives.

Common questions