General · G
Editorial standards
The rules this site is written under. They are here so you can hold us to them, and so that the absence of the usual filler is deliberate rather than accidental.
Sources
Every factual value that is not arithmetic, bag yields, unit weights, truck capacities, standard practice, is traceable to a published document, and that document is listed on the page that uses it. If we cannot find a real source for a number, the number does not go on the page. We do not fabricate URLs, document numbers or publication dates.
Authorship
TakeoffMetric does not put a fake engineer, inspector, or "reviewed by" credential on its pages. Content is written and maintained by the site operator, who is not a licensed engineer. Where professional judgment is required, the page says so and sends you to someone who can give it.
Code and practice
We distinguish three things and label them differently every time: arithmetic (always true), common practice (what is ordinarily done, region by region), and code requirements (what your jurisdiction actually enforces, which we do not restate). A table of common thicknesses is practice. It is never presented as a requirement.
Prices
We publish no national average prices for concrete, materials or labor. They are stale the week they are written and wrong in most markets. Calculators take your quoted price and apply it to a quantity we can actually defend.
Scale
Pages are written one at a time for jobs that exist. No templated city pages, no programmatic keyword variations, no thin spin-offs of a calculator that already exists. Where two search phrases describe the same job, they share one page.
Corrections
Errors get fixed in public. When a fix changes a published result, the formula revision in the title block is bumped and the change is recorded on the corrections page. We do not silently edit numbers.
Advertising
The site is not monetized today and no advertising script is loaded. The layout has ad positions ready; they stay collapsed until advertising is switched on, and from then on their space is reserved so that an ad cannot shift the page. Advertising will be visually separated from content and never placed inside a result.
Privacy
The math runs on your device, and what you type into a calculator is not sent to Google Analytics, the one third-party script on the site, which counts visits. The privacy page lists what it records and how to turn it off.