Good morning everyone! I'm currently building out a website that consists of calculators, tools, etc to help with construction take-off. Right now, it is primarily targeted to heavy/industrial civil industries, but I have plans to expand to piping, electrical and more. While going through the development process, I designed everything to work with the imperial measurement system, of course. However, I think I need to support users outside of the US sooner than later. I have worked with projects designed outside of the united states and often measurements are given in meters or centimeters of course, however how are quantities of concrete, dirt and aggregate used? In my industry we buy concrete and dirt by the cubic yard and aggregate by the ton. Overseas is it common to use cubic meters? What about aggregate? Just looking for anyone's experience and input. Thank you!
I would imagine that most of the metric measurements can be found via Google, so I would start there. In my industry, anytime we use a foreign supplier the project mostly moves to metric because we usually don’t convert due to issues with conversions because of weird footages or lbs.
At the pits they sell everything by the ton because the yard is an elusive measure. The scales don't lie. We plan by cubes and convert. The only thing that gets measured by the yard is the concrete, which is batched by equipment that measures it. I am speaking about USA.
In my experience any country that uses metric measurements whatever goes over a weighbridge such as aggregates is measured in metric tonnes (1000kg/2204 pounds). Concrete is measured in cubic metres. Estimating excavation would be done in bank cubic metres (BCM). The swell factor after blasting etc would give a value in loose cubic metres (LCM).