About Home Yardstick

Last updated October 30, 2026

Home Yardstick is a set of free calculators for people who own or are fixing up a house in the United States. We started with roofing and the exterior, and we're adding heating and cooling, then home electrical. Each tool answers one practical question, such as how steep the roof is, how many bundles to order, or roughly what a job should cost where you live.

How we build the calculators

• Every calculation is a small, separate piece of code with automated tests, including edge cases like zero, negative and very large inputs.
• We check results by hand against worked examples and public references before a page goes live.
• Each page shows the formula, the assumptions and a worked example, so you can check the math without trusting us.
• Cost and climate data come from public sources such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Energy Information Administration and NOAA. The methodology page lists every source and date.

Who's behind it

How it started

Home Yardstick began with a hailstorm. A few years ago a storm tore up the roof on a family house that Raúl was helping look after. Three roofers came out and sent three quotes, and they were thousands of dollars apart. One counted 28 squares, another 34. One included new underlayment and drip edge, another didn't say. Nobody was obviously wrong, and nobody explained their numbers.

Raúl writes software for a living, so he did what he knew. He got the roof's footprint and pitch, looked up how shingle bundles and waste factors work, and built a spreadsheet to check each quote line by line. It turned out the gap came mostly from different waste allowances and whether the ridge and starter courses were counted. With that, the conversation with the roofers got much shorter.

The next summer the same house needed a new air conditioner, and the pattern repeated. One installer sized the system with a quick "500 square feet per ton" rule, another asked about insulation, windows and sun exposure and came back with a smaller unit. A year later came the question of whether the panel could take an EV charger. Each time, the spreadsheet grew a new tab. Friends started asking for a copy, and the spreadsheet became this site.

Raúl isn't a roofer, an HVAC technician or an electrician, and Home Yardstick doesn't pretend to replace one. The goal is narrower: give homeowners the same numbers a contractor starts from, so you can plan a project, read a quote and ask better questions. Where a job needs a licensed professional or a permit, the page says so.

How the site is funded

The calculators are free to use and are paid for by advertising, served by Google AdSense. Advertisers don't choose or review our content, and we don't accept payment to recommend a product or contractor. Ads are kept away from the calculator inputs so they don't get in the way of using the tools.

Corrections

If you find a mistake, a broken result or an out-of-date number, email info@homeyardstick.com. Tell us the page and the inputs you used. We fix confirmed errors and update the "Last updated" date on the page.