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 whether the basement is going too.

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: plaster, concrete, brick, limestone, tile and mortar. 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 Quincy streets and the tight lots down at Marblehead, 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 the newer subdivisions and the village properties out in the county 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 big basement, a barn or a job site.

Worked examples from local jobs

⚠️ Older houses size DOWN

The instruction that runs opposite to instinct, and the one that saves the most money in this city.

Quincy has an unusual amount of substantial nineteenth-century housing — the East End district is one of the largest in the country, and there is fine older building well beyond it. Inside those walls:

• Plaster and lath, several times the weight of drywall for the same wall area.
• Dimensional lumber, denser than modern framing.
• Cast iron plumbing and radiators, worth pulling as scrap.
• Mortar beds under older bathroom tile.
• Limestone in foundations, steps and walls — quarried a few miles downriver.

So for pre-war renovation: size down one and expect to fill it. You get volume through swaps, never through a bigger box, because a 30 yard full of plaster cannot legally be hauled. There is more detail here, including what to test for and what to salvage.

The basement factor

The other big local variable, pulling in the opposite direction.

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

• Add a size for any clear-out that includes the basement.
• Contents are bulky and light — boxes, furniture, paperwork, old appliances, 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. Older basements here take water, and anything that sat wet is heavier.
• The chemicals live down there — paint, fuel, solvents. Pull them before anything else moves.
• Watch for old boiler and furnace insulation, which in a pre-1980 house may contain asbestos and is exactly what gets torn out without a second thought.

Winter and the driveway

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.
• Grade. Quincy stands on a bluff and the ground east of town rolls more than people expect — several neighborhoods have real slopes, and ice on a slope changes what a loaded truck can safely do.
• 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? 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.
• Roughly when the house was built. Pre-war and post-war size very differently here.
• Whether it is plaster or drywall. The single most useful thing you can tell us.
• Whether the basement is included. It changes the answer more than anything else.
• Whether there is concrete, limestone, mortar or tile. Those get their own small container.
• Which city or village, and whether you are inside the Quincy city limits.
• 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.