How Much Wood Chips Do I Need?

wood chip for sale

From Cubic Meters to bales

Buying woodchip means you’re getting lots of small pieces of wood instead of one easily-measurable plank because of this woodchip is measured in volume, generally in litres or by the cubic meter for larger orders.

This has the benefit of making it easy to know the exact amount of wood you’re getting when shopping online. However, it can be hard to translate these measurements into a picturable amount.

If you are put off by measurements of cubic meters and wondering, ‘how many do I need?’ hopefully, this post can help assist you.

What are the woodchips for?

The first step when figuring out how much woodchip you need is knowing what you’ll be using the woodchips for. Mulching large flower beds, for example, would require far more woodchip than powering a household boiler for a day.

Some reasons you might purchase different quantities of wood chips include the following:

  • Mulching
  • Landscaping
  • Boiler fuel
  • Other biofuel needs
  • Smoking food*
  • Animal bedding
how much wood chips do I need
how much wood chips do I need

For consistent purchasing – such as when heating your home with a biofuel boiler – you probably won’t be thinking, ‘How much wood chips do I need?’ Since buying in bulk is almost always cheaper.

Alternatively, for one-off purchases like bordering the paths in your garden, there are equations that can assist you as long as you have a decent idea of the surface area you’ll be covering. Mulch, for example, needs a thicker layer to be effective, as mentioned in a previous post.

Although most good quality wood chips are seasoned, you should take care when using them for cooking. If unsure, always buy chips designed for smoking food for human consumption, like applewood or hickory.

Using Your Maths… Or Our Handy Calculator

When answering the question “how much wood chips do I need?” the scenario is important. For the purpose of this explanation, we’re going to use a flower bed as an example.

Imagine you’ve planted bulbs in a flower bed roughly eight meters by five meters across. You’re buying wood chips to mulch the bed before the frost comes in in autumn. You want to apply the mulch across the whole flower bed in a thickness of 4CM.

The formula to figure out how much wood chips you need is to multiply the length and width of the bed by the thickness of the layer. So:

8 x 5 = 40

40 x 0.04 = 1.6

It is important to keep the unit of measurement consistent. Here we’ve used meters which is why 4CM became 0.04 and gave us 1.6 cubic meters.

wood chips for sale
woodchip for sale

Alternatively, on our Man Coed online shop we have included a wood chip and mulch calculator in our product description. If you’re browsing our selection of high-quality wood chips, you can scroll to the bottom of the page and have it worked out for you. Telling you exactly how much wood chips you need.

If you are after high-quality, seasoned wood chips – dried to various moisture contents – then Man Coed’s recycled tree waste wood chipping has you covered! If not, we at least hope we’ve answered your question, “how much woodchip do I need?”

Wood Chips Volume Calculator

how much wood chips do I need

Residential or commercial work?