Calculators & Converters | Rick's Hobby Garage

Calculators and Converters:

Calculate the Amount of Soil Needed for a Rectangular Raised Planter

Here is a calculator you can use to figure out the amount of soil you need to fill up your rectangular shaped raised garden bed. This gives you the total volume, or the amount of, soil you need.

Be sure to subtract the difference from the top of the planter to where you want your soil and use the interior dimensions, not overall, of your planter. Your soil might be 2 or 3 inches below the top edge of your planter.

The volume of a rectangular prism (your planter) is simply v=length x width x height.

Calculate the Amount of Soil Needed for a Circular Raised Planter

Here is a calculator you can use to figure out the amount of soil you need to fill up your circular shaped raised garden bed. This gives you the total volume, or the amount of, soil you need.

Since your raised planter is basically a cylinder, you can use the formula v=3.14r²h to find the volume, where V is the volume, r is the radius, h is the height.

Convert Feet and Inch to Inches

Most tape measures give you the number of feet and inches, along with the total number of inches. But this is not always the case and sometimes we need to know the number of inches, not feet.

Converting feet and inches to inches is pretty straight forward, but sometimes we just have a hard time figuring out the math in our head and don’t recall our 12x multiples. All you have to do is take the number of feet you have and multiply it by 12 and add the number of inches. For example, 5 feet 4 inches is…5 feet x 12 = 60 inches + 4 inches = 64 inches. That is all there is to it.

If you need assistance, here is a calculator to convert this for you so that you don’t have to remember what needs to happen in the calculation.

Just enter the number of feet you have in the first line and the number of inches you have left over in the second line. The total will give you the total number of inches.

This is needed for some of the calculators on this page until I figure more Java coding to convert feet and inch as 5′-4″ into an actual number, but until then, I have to keep the coding super simple for myself.

Calculate the Number of Standard 8″x8″x16″ CMU Blocks for Your Raised Planter

This calculator will calculate the number of standard CMU blocks you need in a single row for your raised planter, assuming that it is square or rectangular. All measurements are in inches and in 8″ increments. If you have a decimal as a result, then your inches are not in 8″ increments.

If you have multiple rows of CMU, take the result above and multiply it by the number of rows you have.