Sizing

What Size Dumpster Do I Need? An Honest Local Guide

Most guides ask you to estimate cubic yards. Around here the answer usually turns on the basement and the age of the house.

Start with the material, not the number

Almost nobody can estimate their own debris in cubic yards, and guides that ask you to are not much help. We ask three things instead: what are you throwing out, roughly how much in terms you can picture, and where will the container sit.

Those three answers pick the size reliably. The cubic yard figure is just the label on the box.

Volume and weight, and which binds first

Every container has two limits and you will hit one first. Volume is obvious — you cannot load above the top rail. Weight is the one people forget and the one that costs money.

Each size includes a tonnage allowance: roughly one to two tons on a 10 yard, four to five on a 30. Past that you pay a per-ton overage, which we quote before you book.

What each size really holds

10 yard — 12 ft × 8 ft × 3.5 ft

Three to four pickup loads, one to two tons. The small-job container and the heavy material container: concrete, brick, tile, soil and plaster. Low sides mean you can throw material over the wall without a ramp.

15 yard — 16 ft × 8 ft × 4 ft

Five to six pickup loads, two to three tons. The under-used size, and the one we place most often in the older streets of Rock Island, the Moline river neighborhoods and the narrow river villages up Route 84, where sixteen feet fits a short driveway and twenty-two does not.

20 yard — 22 ft × 8 ft × 4.5 ft

Seven to eight pickup loads, three to four tons. Our most common residential container, and the default across Coal Valley, Bettendorf and the newer subdivisions where driveways are generous.

30 yard — 22 ft × 8 ft × 6 ft

Ten to twelve pickup loads, four to five tons. Same footprint as the 20 with eighteen more inches of height, so it holds half again as much without needing more driveway. The right call for a whole-house clear-out, a large basement, a barn or a job site.

Worked examples from local jobs

The basement factor

The single biggest difference between sizing a job here and sizing the same job somewhere without basements.

Nearly every house across Moline and the surrounding cities has a full basement. That is not extra living space so much as extra storage space, and on a house that has been in one family for decades it is usually full to the joists.

What that means when you are sizing:

• Add a size to whatever you first thought for any clear-out that includes the basement.
• Basement contents are bulky and light — boxes, furniture, old appliances, paperwork, holiday decorations, exercise equipment. Volume binds long before weight.
• Getting it up the stairs is the real work. Place the container as close to the door you will actually use as we can get it. Fifteen extra feet of carry, repeated three hundred times, is the whole job.
• Check for damp damage first. River-city basements take water, and anything that has sat wet is heavier and may need handling differently.
• Paint, chemicals and fuel live down there. Pull them before anything else moves — they have their own route, and it is in Iowa.
• The old chest freezer is a white good, which is barred from landfill by state law. Free county collection instead.

Older river-city housing weighs more

Our service area spans a wide range of building ages and it changes the arithmetic.

The newer suburbs — much of Coal Valley, Bettendorf, Eldridge, the southern edges of Silvis — are drywall over stud and modern materials throughout. Sizing there is predictable.

The older river-city neighborhoods — the Rock Island historic districts, the older Moline streets, LeClaire's riverfront, Geneseo's centre — are a different job:

• Plaster and lath is dramatically heavier than drywall for the same wall area.
• Dimensional lumber is denser than modern framing.
• Cast iron plumbing weighs many times what plastic does — and is worth pulling as scrap.
• Older bathrooms often have a mortar bed under the tile.
• In any building predating 1980, have floor tile, pipe lagging, siding, textured ceilings and boiler insulation tested before demolition starts.

Rule of thumb: for pre-war renovation, size down one and expect to fill it. You get volume through swaps, not through a bigger box.

Winter, and where the driveway decides it

In a good part of our area the driveway picks the container rather than the debris. A 20 yard is twenty-two feet, and the truck needs roughly ten more feet of clear run behind it. A 15 yard takes six feet less.

Add the local constraints:

• Snow banks narrow a driveway by a foot on each side, which can turn a workable 20 yard placement into a 15 yard one.
• Ice on a slope changes what a loaded truck can safely do — and the river villages and the bluff communities have real grades.
• A container can freeze to the ground. Boards help considerably.
• Snow and rain in an open container are weight you pay for. Ask about a cover on a long winter placement.
• Overhead branches. About twenty-two feet of clear height to raise the bed, and the mature canopy in the older neighborhoods is genuinely low in places.
• Where does the plow push the snow? Worth telling us — a spot that works in October can be unreachable in January.

How to describe your job on the phone

• What the material is. "Kitchen cabinets, countertop, appliances and 200 square feet of tile" tells us everything.
• Whether the basement is included. It changes the answer more than anything else.
• Roughly when the house was built. Pre-war and post-war size differently.
• Whether there is concrete, plaster or tile. Those get their own small container.
• Which city, and which side of the river. Rules and access differ at every line here.
• Driveway width, length, grade and any low branches — and in winter, where the snow is.

Ninety seconds on the phone is the difference between a flat rate that holds and a truck that has to leave again.