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 whether there is stone involved.

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, block, tile, mortar and local quartzite. 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 Dell Rapids and Canton — and across the whole metro in winter, when snow banks take a foot off each side of every driveway.

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 in Harrisburg, Tea and Brandon 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 machine shed or a job site.

Worked examples from local jobs

⚠️ The basement factor

The biggest single local variable, and the one that most often pushes a job up a size.

Nearly every house in this region has a full basement, and the reason is the frost line — foundations have to go deep enough to sit below it anyway, so the marginal cost of a full basement is small. What that means in practice is that almost every house here has a large, dry, permanent storage space, and on a home held by one family for decades it is 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, holiday decorations. 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.
• The chemicals live down there — paint, fuel, solvents, batteries. Pull them before anything else moves, and take them to the Household Hazardous Waste Facility.
• Watch for old furnace and boiler insulation, which in a pre-1980 house may contain asbestos and is exactly what gets torn out without a second thought.

Quartzite and heavy debris

The local wrinkle on the other side of the scale.

Sioux Falls is built on and around Sioux quartzite — the pink stone the falls run over, quarried here and at Dell Rapids and Garretson for well over a century. A great deal of older building in this region uses it, and it turns up in foundations, walls, steps and landscaping.

It is exceptionally dense. So:

• Stone work goes in a 10 yard, part filled. It will reach its weight allowance while it still looks half empty.
• Keep it clean and separate. Concrete, brick, block and stone have their own disposal route, which is cheaper than mixed waste — but only if the load is not contaminated with timber and household material.
• Do not judge by eye. The most common overage we see in this market is somebody looking at a half-full container of masonry and adding more.

Winter changes the answer

For a good part of the year the driveway picks the container rather than the debris.

• Snow banks narrow a driveway by a foot or more on each side, which can turn a workable 20 yard placement into a 15 yard one.
• A container can freeze to the ground. Boards help considerably.
• Snow in an open container is weight you pay for. Ask about a cover.
• Street plow banks can block the approach entirely.
• Overhead branches — about twenty-two feet of clear height to raise the bed.

There is a full winter guide here, and it is worth reading before booking anything between November and March.

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 here.
• Whether there is concrete, quartzite, brick or tile. Those get their own small container.
• Roughly when the house was built. Pre-1980 means testing before demolition.
• Which city — and whether you are inside the Sioux Falls city limits.
• Driveway width, length, surface and any low branches.
• In winter, where the snow has been pushed.

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