Trench Excavation - Materials Estimates

[IronDogg]

I was wondering if anyone in the deep utility (i.e water, wastewater) repair/replacement industry would have (and be willing to share) their method/spreadsheet for estimating volumes of materials required for trench excavations? (i.e screened rock, crushed gravel, pit run, sand, native backfill material re-use and waste, black dirt, etc).

Ideally, it would be convenient to be able to enter some basic info such as pipe length and size, invert depth, trench bottom width and height, and side slope angle, then with some constants for depths of different subgrade materials based on the specs for sub-base and trench backfill layers, formula magic happens to tell me how much of each material is required for a job.

 

[IronDogg]

No one uses excel to calculate and estimate jobs, or no one wants to share? J/k, I have started one for myself, but I am not an expert in excel by any means and was thinking that someone out there must have a pretty good one already...

 

[dik]

I use a format similar to the attached... my capital cost estimates are not of the same accuracy that you are looking for. You may want to talk to a local civil contractor.

Dik

 

[IronDogg]

Thanks for the reply and the link. I have been working on one when I can, but development of it can be a challenge sometimes as I seem to spend more time on the excel forums trying to learn formulas than I do getting much accomplished on that sheet...

 

[dik]

My spreadsheet for costing has over 1000 line items... in a similar fashion... just a matter of updating material costs (less of a variant) and labour costs... the amount of unit time to do a task doesn't change very much.

Dik