Sizing

What Size Dumpster Do I Need? An Honest Loganville Guide

Most sizing guides lead with cubic yards. That is the least useful number, because almost nobody can estimate their own debris in cubic yards. Here is how we actually do it on the phone.

Why cubic yards is the wrong question

Every dumpster sizing guide opens the same way: a 10 yard holds ten cubic yards, a 20 yard holds twenty. True, and almost completely useless, because nobody standing in their garage looking at twenty years of accumulated stuff can convert that into cubic yards.

What we actually ask on the phone is three questions. What are you throwing away? How much of it, in terms you can picture — pickup loads, rooms, squares of roof? And where is it going to sit? Those three answers get us to the right container about ninety-five percent of the time, and everything after that is about weight.

The two constraints: volume and weight

Every container has two limits and you will hit one of them first. Volume is the obvious one: the box is only so big and you cannot legally load above the top rail. Weight is the one people forget, and it is the one that costs money.

Each size comes with an included tonnage. A 10 yard typically includes one to two tons, a 30 yard four to five. Go over and you pay a per-ton overage rate, 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 included. The small-job container and, more importantly, the heavy material container. A bathroom gut. A patio slab. Broken concrete, brick and red clay soil. Low three-and-a-half-foot 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 most under-used size in the industry. Around here it earns its place on the older, tighter lots — Lilburn, downtown Monroe, the streets around the Covington and Oxford squares — where a 20 yard's twenty-two feet simply will not go.

20 yard — 22 ft × 8 ft × 4.5 ft

Seven to eight pickup loads. Three to four tons. Our most popular container by a wide margin, because it covers the three most common real-world projects: a shingle re-roof, a full kitchen renovation, and a finished basement coming out.

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 any more driveway. The builder's container, and the right call for a barn or outbuilding coming down out toward Good Hope or Jersey.

Worked examples from real jobs around here

The weight traps in the Piedmont

Concrete, brick and block

Roughly 4,000 pounds per cubic yard. A single cubic yard of broken slab weighs about as much as a small car. Worth knowing locally: clean concrete, brick and rock have their own recycling route right here in Loganville, so if you can keep it clean it does not need a mixed container at all.

Plaster and heart pine

The older housing around Monroe, Covington, Oxford and Stone Mountain Village is plaster on lath with old-growth heart pine framing, and both are dramatically heavier than the drywall and modern lumber that replaced them. A room that would be a comfortable half-container of drywall can be at its weight allowance in plaster alone.

Wet material

Anything that has taken water — basement carpet, drywall, subfloor — weighs a multiple of its dry equivalent. Say so when you book and we will size for weight rather than for how the pile looks.

Rain in an open container

Georgia gets serious rain and an open container left through a wet week gains real weight that you pay for by the ton. Keep dense loads covered.

Red clay is the local surprise

Worth its own section, because it catches almost everyone doing yard or land work.

Georgia Piedmont red clay is heavy, and it is heavier still when wet, which it often is. It comes up with root balls, it clings to stumps, it comes out with old fence posts, and it sits at the bottom of a container adding tonnage nobody accounted for.

Two practical rules. Shake the clay off root balls before they go in — the difference between a shaken and an unshaken root ball is genuinely a matter of hundreds of pounds. And if you have soil in any quantity, tell us, because soil belongs in a 10 yard part-filled and nowhere else.

The upside: clean earth, rock and clay have an inert recycling route locally rather than a landfill one. More on that here.

Two smaller containers vs one big one

On larger jobs this is frequently the cheaper route, and almost nobody asks about it.

Disposal is priced by stream. Mixed construction and demolition debris costs the most per ton. Clean inert material — concrete, brick, rock, earth — goes to an inert facility instead. Clean vegetation and land clearing debris has its own route as well.

So on a property clearance producing concrete, brush and general debris, two containers will very often cost less in total than one mixed 30 yard, even after paying for the extra movement.

The test is whether you have enough of a clean stream to justify a dedicated container. Half a container of clean concrete, yes. A wheelbarrow full, no.

How to describe your job on the phone

• What the material is. "Kitchen cabinets, countertop, appliances and about 200 square feet of tile floor" tells us everything.
• Whether it is plaster or drywall. It genuinely changes the container.
• Roughly how much. Rooms, squares of roof, or pickup loads.
• Whether there is soil or clay in it. The single most common overage cause here.
• Whether anything has been wet. It changes the weight answer completely.
• Where it is going, the driveway width, and whether there are low branches.

That is a ninety-second conversation and it is the difference between a flat rate that holds and an estimate that moves.