Cement Mortar Calculator

Information

When constructing a private house or garage, you have to deal with mortar – a mixture of cement, sand, and water. This mortar, in various proportions, is used for bricklaying and plastering walls, screeding floors, and other tasks. Making an estimate by yourself – calculating the quantity and cost of materials – is not as simple as it seems. The online calculator helps quickly and conveniently calculate the composition of the mortar for bricklaying, screeding, and plastering, and determine the cost of the necessary building materials. With the mortar calculator, you can accurately determine how much cement and sand is required for each type of work.

Functions of the Online Calculator

The online calculator for calculating the composition of the mortar is a service that includes:

• a set of fields for entering parameters;
• an additional function "Calculate cost";
• a "CALCULATE" button;
• a set of fields displaying the calculation results.

The calculator determines the mobility grade P of the selected mortar, as well as calculates the quantity and cost of the materials needed to prepare the mixture. The calculator's functionality allows you to save the final result as a PDF file with one click, and also print it out.

How to Use the Calculator

To get the final result, enter the following data into the calculator's fields:

• The required volume of mortar in m³;
• The desired grade of mortar;
• Select the purpose of the mortar;
• Select the grade of cement.

Then, if you need to calculate the cost of sand and cement, check the box "Calculate cost" and enter the prices per unit of the goods in the fields:

The price of 1 bag of cement;

The price of sand per 1 ton.

Click the "CALCULATE" button to get the final calculation. This way, you can accurately find out how much material you need and their cost.

Useful Information

According to their purpose, builders distinguish several types of mortars:

• Masonry mortars – used for laying walls of bricks, blocks, and panels, building fences of rubble stone, filling voids, and sealing joints between wall materials.
• Plaster and finishing mortars – used for coating and finishing walls with a thin plaster layer. Finishing mortars have low mobility and a fine-grained composition, as they are applied to vertical surfaces;
• Special mortars – used for specific purposes: furnace masonry, well-cementing, acoustic, thermal insulation, waterproofing, etc.

According to their composition, the main types of mortars are:

• Lime mortars – used for interior works, they have good plasticity but low strength;
• Cement-lime mortars – used for both exterior and interior works as masonry, plaster, and screeding mortars. They have good strength and plasticity;
• Cement-sand mortars – widely used for both exterior and interior works. They have high strength but low plasticity, so in some cases, plasticizing additives are added to such mortars.

In preparing mortar, the classic composition is considered to be a ratio of cement to sand of 1:3. First, cement and sand are mixed to a homogeneous mass, and water is added as needed. As a result, its amount can reach 95% of the volume of cement.

This mortar is used for masonry and plastering work, and floor screeds. However, the mixture has a limited setting time. Therefore, additives like lime milk or detergent are often added to the mortar. With these components, the working time of the mortar is extended by several hours.

For more comfortable work with cement mortars, plasticizers or regular household detergents should be used for domestic works. They help achieve mortar plasticity and simplify the mixing process. The choice of plasticizers is quite large; you need to choose the most suitable for your conditions, for example, in cold weather, use plasticizers with antifreeze additives.

For laying bricks and building blocks, there are "warm" mortars with thermal insulating binders, such as polystyrene foam, expanded clay, and perlite sand. These mortars prevent heat loss through "thermal bridges" and make the wall more monolithic in its properties.

Mobility is an important parameter of the mortar. You need to choose the one that corresponds to the type of work. Use the calculator to accurately determine the necessary concentration of components and the amount of mortar required. This way, you can easily find out how much cement per cubic meter of mortar you need.

Reference

Mortar – a mixture of several components: a binder (cement, lime, clay, gypsum), filler (sand, ash), and water, which hardens into artificial stone. Sometimes plasticizing or antifreeze additives are added to the mortar to improve its properties.

Cement – a mineral hydraulic binder of artificial origin. When mixed with water, it forms a plastic mass, quickly hardens, and turns into stone. Cement is obtained by fine grinding of gypsum stone and clinker – a material obtained by firing limestone and clay. It is one of the main building materials.

Rubble masonry – stone masonry made of rubble, large uneven broken, or whole stones. Mainly, hard rocks are used for rubble masonry: limestone, sandstone, shell rock, tuff, granite, dolomite, basalt, and gabbro.

Jointing – construction and finishing works performed after bricklaying, blocks, etc., aimed at giving the wall an attractive appearance. The work involves forming a smooth joint of a certain profile using a special tool – a jointer.