About this site

YardsNeeded works out how much material a job needs and answers in the unit the material is actually sold in. Every figure on the site either comes from a manufacturer data sheet, cited with the date it was read, or is plain geometry that you can check on paper.

Who makes it

It is built and maintained by Javier Miralles, at Easybyte Hub S. Coop. Mad., a software co-operative based in Spain. Write to [email protected] if a number looks wrong — that is the message we most want to get.

How the pages are made, plainly

Every page on this site is generated from one data file, and the text was drafted with AI tooling working to a brief, then reviewed by a person before it went up. We are saying so because you would reasonably want to know, and because a site that hides how it was built has given you a reason to doubt the rest of it.

That is also why the checking is where the effort went. The arithmetic is a small library covered by automated tests, and the tests do something unusual: they re-run every figure printed in the prose and fail the build if the words and the maths disagree. That test exists because it caught a real mistake — a worked example that read 1.27 cubic yards where the arithmetic gives 1.26.

A manufacturer's figure is not published until someone has opened the data sheet and read it, and the date of that reading is printed on the page. When we cannot source a figure we leave it out and say why — which is the reason no page here gives a quantity in tons.

What we will not do

• Print a number we cannot source. A calculator that is confidently wrong is worse than none.
• Quote what materials cost. Prices depend on your supplier, your region and the week.
• Ask for your email before showing you the answer.

Corrections

If a figure is wrong, tell us and we will fix it and say what changed. Building work has a real cost to getting it wrong: concrete poured short is concrete poured twice.