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 age of the house and the shape of the driveway.

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, stone, 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 borough streets — Bellwood, Tyrone's centre, Hollidaysburg near the courthouse, Roaring Spring — and on any driveway with a real grade to it.

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 the flatter valley ground and the more open township properties.

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 barn or a job site.

Worked examples from local jobs

Older housing weighs more

Our service area spans a wide range of building ages, and it changes the arithmetic more than anything else.

The railroad-era borough housing — much of Bellwood, Tyrone's centre, the older Altoona streets, Hollidaysburg near the courthouse — is a different job from post-war building:

• Plaster and lath is dramatically heavier than drywall for the same wall area. A room that would fill a quarter of a 20 yard in drywall can reach the weight allowance in plaster.
• 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, several times the weight of a modern tile-on-backer installation.
• In any building predating 1980, have floor tile, pipe lagging, siding and textured ceilings tested before demolition starts.

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

Basements and barns

Two local storage traps, and they push in the same direction.

Basements. Most of the older housing here has one, and on a house held by one family for decades it holds more than the rest of the house combined. Contents are bulky and light, so volume binds long before weight. Add a size for any clear-out that includes it, and 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.

Barns and outbuildings. Out in Morrisons Cove, Sinking Valley and the townships, farm buildings are the single most unpredictable thing we size for. A barn can hold three decades of stored timber, old fencing, machinery parts and hay, and the honest answer is that nobody knows what is in there until it comes out. We usually recommend a 30 yard with a swap on standby rather than guessing low.

Farm clearances also turn up more prohibited material than any other job type — old fuel, agricultural chemicals, tires and batteries. Sort those before loading starts.

Where the driveway decides it

Across a good part of our area the container size is chosen by the driveway rather than by the debris.

A 20 yard is twenty-two feet of container, and the truck needs roughly ten more feet of clear run behind it to set down and pick up. A 15 yard takes six feet less on the ground and is meaningfully lighter loaded.

That matters here for two reasons the flatter parts of the country do not have:

• Grade. On a sloped or gravel drive, a smaller container is sometimes the only workable answer — covered in full here.
• Older frontages. The railroad-era borough streets have narrow lots and short driveways, built long before anyone was reversing a roll-off truck up them.

Also worth mentioning at booking: overhead branches. We need about twenty-two feet of clear height to raise the bed, and the mature street canopy across this area is genuinely low in places.

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.
• Roughly when the house was built. Pre-war and post-war size differently.
• Whether a basement, attic or barn is included.
• Whether there is concrete, stone or plaster. Those get their own small container.
• Which municipality. Rules and access differ at every line around here.
• Driveway width, length, surface, grade and any low branches.

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