Get Set for More Concrete Calculators!

Ready for more concrete information? In Finding Online Concrete Calculators: is it Getting Harder? I recommended the best calculators for a base or pad. As I mentioned there, many online calculators can help you to work out how much concrete you need for a project. But many are basically volume calculators — for some projects, you may want a little more help.

In this post, I look at calculators for piers, walls, and foundations. As with the base/pad calculators, I looked for online tools that go a bit further than the norm. Some can work with more complex shapes than just squares and rectangles. I even found some that will calculate how many bags you need.

Concrete Piers

When you are building a structure such as a deck, you might need to build concrete piers for support. Piers are often made using cylindrical cardboard tubes, which come in different diameters to suit your needs. There are many online calculators that will help you work out how much concrete it’s going to take to fill a tube.

The Lowes calculator is the most useful as it will tell you how much concrete you need in cubic yards and bags.

If your piers are not cylinders, but have a square section, the BlockLayer.com calculator is the only one that can help you.

And if you want to use spread footings under your piers, the Fine Homebuilding calculator will calculate how many cubic yards and bags you need. What they don’t tell you is what size bags they’re talking about. For that info, use our Concrete Bag Calculator.

This table summarizes the better calculators for building concrete piers.

Concrete Walls

There are not many concrete wall calculators, but that’s ok — you can get the information you’re looking for from one of the two reviewed here.

If you want to build a wall by pouring concrete into a form, Lowes have the calculator for you. It will tell you the how many of cubic yards and bags you need.

If you want to know how much concrete it will take to fill the cavities in a concrete block wall, then you should try out the Concrete.com calculator. It gives the result in cubic yards; here’s the link for calculating the number of bags.

These two resources are outlined in the following table.

Concrete Foundations

If you need to build a foundation, there are two excellent foundation calculators, which deal with different foundation types.

Monopour/Slab

If your building will have a slab foundation, the BlockLayer.com calculator is easily the best. It will calculate the amount of concrete needed for a number of different shapes with different profiles. There are helpful diagrams, and there is a rebar calculator at the bottom of the page.

Stem Wall and Slab, Crawl Space, or Basement

If you need a deeper foundation than a simple slab, Construction Resource has the calculator for you. It will calculate the amount of concrete needed for stem wall, crawl space and basement type foundations.

You can find more information about these calculators in this table.

You can easily spend several hours hopping from calculator to calculator online, finding different results along the way. If you have a concrete project coming up, I hope these reviews will help streamline the planning and shopping stages. The sooner you are done, the sooner you can start the next project!