About us
Locally Owned Dumpster Rental in Hartford Since 2014
One truck, one phone number and a promise to quote honestly. Here is how Heeny & Co Dumpster Rental grew into the Capitol Region’s go-to roll-off company — and why Declan Heeny still answers the phone.
Our story
It started with a borrowed truck and a house full of somebody else’s junk
Declan Heeny grew up here, in a Perfect Six off Wethersfield Avenue that his grandparents bought when the insurance offices and the Colt works were still the reason people moved to Hartford, and went to work for a Hartford remodelling crew out of school. He spent most of his twenties in basements and attics, tearing out plaster and lath, stripping shingles in June, breaking out old flatwork, and pulling down porches and back stairs from Frog Hollow out to Barry Square, watching the same problems repeat themselves. The container never came when it was supposed to. When it did, the invoice had grown. Nobody ever warns a landlord that the plaster and lath off two rooms weighs far more than the pile looks, or that the spoil out of a footing dig taken down to the 42-inch frost line will hit legal transport weight in a box that still looks half empty, so the can that sounded generous on the phone is at payload while it is half full, and then it sits in the driveway too heavy to move.
In 2014 he bought a used roll-off truck and four cans, parked them on 192 Ledyard St in the South Meadows, Hartford’s industrial river district, and started answering the phone himself. Declan still takes most of the calls and still runs the dispatch board. The first job was a shingle tear-off on a six-family off Maple Avenue for an owner whose previous hauler had cancelled twice while the crew stood on the roof waiting. She still calls us, and she still tells the story.
Word moved the way it does here — through contractors, through neighbours, through the man at the supply counter who mentions that the dumpster people actually showed up. Then two things settled it: winter, when one hard storm puts a run of roof, ceiling and tree work on the books over a weekend and every crew in Greater Hartford wants a can in the same fortnight; and the spring thaw, when the frost lets go, water gets into cellars across the multifamily streets, and landlords, families and estates all want a container inside the same three weeks. We added trucks as the calls came in rather than borrowing against volume we did not have yet. 12 years on we run a small fleet, we still dispatch out of Hartford, and the phone still rings at a desk with somebody local behind it.
Why we care about getting the quote right
The dumpster industry has an image problem and it is largely self-inflicted. Low teaser rates, a tonnage allowance buried in the fine print, then a bill with an overage charge nobody explained. We priced against that from day one. When you call, we ask what you are throwing away, what it weighs, how long you need it and where it is going. Then we give you a number that includes delivery, pickup, the rental window and disposal. If we think you are about to order the wrong size, we say so — even when the wrong size is the more expensive one.
What being local actually buys you
It is not a slogan. It means our dispatcher knows which blocks off Wethersfield Avenue, Maple Avenue and Sigourney Street have a single shared drive between two buildings and a maple limb too low for the arm, which Perfect Sixes in Frog Hollow and off New Britain Avenue have a rear yard the truck cannot reach, which downtown addresses off Main Street and Columbus Boulevard have no driveway at all, which gravel and dirt pads a loaded truck should not commit to for a day or two after a thaw, which kerbside spots are gone until the ploughed snow goes, which addresses just across the line are actually West Hartford, Wethersfield or Newington and answer to a different town hall, that a condominium association rather than the City decides where a can may sit, and roughly what a six-unit building with a full basement, a packed attic, a back shed and three generations of storage produces when it finally gets cleared out. It means that when a storm comes through Greater Hartford and half the region wants a container in the same week, our trucks are already here.
At a glance
- Founded2014
- OwnerDeclan Heeny
- BaseHartford, CT
- Container sizes10, 15, 20, 30, 40 yd³
- Service radius~35 miles
- InsuranceFull commercial cover
Our values
Six things we do not negotiate on
We quote it, we honour it
The number on the phone is the number on the invoice. If we get the size wrong, that is our mistake to wear, not yours.
We turn up
A delivery window means a delivery window. If something goes sideways — and occasionally it does — you get a phone call, not silence.
We treat the property like ours
Boards under the rails, a walk of the drop, and a driver who will move the can rather than argue about where it landed.
We sort before we bury
Metal, clean wood, cardboard and brush get separated and recovered where we can, and we will tell you to pull salvage first. It is cheaper for you and better than filling a hole.
We tell you the awkward thing
If your job needs two hauls instead of one, or a permit you did not know about, you hear it before we load the truck.
We answer to neighbours
We live here. Our kids go to school here. There is no head office to hide behind when something goes wrong.
Experience
What 12 years around Hartford containers teaches you
We have seen the mistakes so you do not have to
The four that cost people the most money, in order: sizing by volume when the debris is dense, because broken concrete, brick, plaster and lath, and spoil out of a footing dig taken to the 42-inch frost line all hit payload while the box still looks half empty; forgetting that an older Hartford building has a full basement and a full attic in it, so a turnover that reads like a 20 on the ground floor is really a 30 once the stairs are counted; assuming the kerb will absorb the overflow, when city collection reaches only a single family home, a multifamily of six units or less or a condo association of six units or less, allows two free bulky pickups per unit per year of five items or fewer, and names construction debris as unacceptable material that will get a cart skipped; and leaving the corrugated cardboard and the scrap metal in a mixed load when Connecticut designates both as mandatory recyclables that have to be separated from building material wastes. Every one of those is avoidable with one honest conversation before delivery.
We have cleared full basements and attics out of six-family buildings that had not been emptied since the 1970s, Perfect Six turnovers in Frog Hollow where a unit changes hands and forty years goes out in a fortnight, ice-dam damage where the ceilings, the insulation and half the plaster came down before the roof went back on, porch and back-stair rebuilds where the posts came up with their footings still attached, basement work alongside an old heating oil tank that had to come out as a licensed job before anything else moved, storm limb wood run as clean separate loads of maple, oak, ash and white pine, kitchen and bath gut-outs where the cabinets and sheetrock the city bulky programme will not take went straight into the can, foundation and bulkhead digs that went out by weight rather than volume, restaurant and retail fit-outs along Main Street and Farmington Avenue, and estate cleanouts where a family had a fortnight to empty a house. Every one of those loads behaves differently at the scale house, and knowing that in advance is most of the job.
Credentials and cover
- Licensed to haul solid waste in Connecticut
- Full commercial general liability and auto cover — certificates available on request for GCs and property managers
- Workers’ compensation cover for every driver on the road
- Material taken only to permitted, licensed transfer and disposal facilities
- Compliance with Connecticut’s mandatory recyclable requirements under CGS §22a-241b, with corrugated cardboard and scrap metal separated out of building material wastes, liquids and asbestos kept out of every container, and mixed construction and demolition loads taken to a permitted processing facility rather than direct to disposal
Contractors and property managers: ask for our COI when you set up an account. We can usually have it emailed the same day.
Community
We are part of Hartford, not just parked in it
We donate container time to local school and church cleanup projects, we discount storm work for older residents on fixed incomes when a tree comes down, and we sponsor a couple of youth teams that mostly involve us hauling nets around at weekends. None of that makes us special — it is what a business in a city this size is supposed to do.
Hartford is a working city and it has been one for a very long time. It grew up on the Connecticut River as a capital, an insurance town and a manufacturing town — the insurance companies headquartered here for generations, and the Colt armoury south of downtown, now Coltsville National Historical Park. The housing built for the people who worked in both is still the housing stock, and it is still what we haul out of: above all the “Hartford Perfect Six”, described in the Connecticut State Historic Preservation Office’s National Register nomination as “essentially a variation on the triple decker … three stories in height with a symmetrical, double-bow facade and a center-hall main entrance and was designed to accommodate six units, two on each floor”, built through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with a yellow-brick variant in the 1920s. Half of the city’s housing units predate 1950, 81 percent are multifamily and only 25.7 percent are owner-occupied, which is why the phone here is answered mostly for landlords, property managers and contractors rather than homeowners clearing a garage. The landmarks fill in the rest of the map: the Mark Twain House at 351 Farmington Avenue, completed in September 1874; the Stowe Center for Literary Activism at 77 Forest Street; the Connecticut State Capitol at 210 Capitol Avenue, begun in 1871 and completed in 1878; Bushnell Park at 60 Elm Street, which the National Park Service describes as the first park in America conceived, built and paid for by its own citizens through a popular vote; the Wadsworth Atheneum at 600 Main Street, founded in 1842, which describes itself as the oldest continuously-operating public art museum in the United States; Dunkin’ Park at 1214 Main Street, opened in 2017 and home of the Hartford Yard Goats; PeoplesBank Arena on Civic Center Plaza; Trinity College, founded in 1823, on Summit Street, and UConn Hartford on Prospect Street; Hartford Hospital at 80 Seymour Street; the Connecticut Science Center at 250 Columbus Boulevard; and the parks — Keney Park at 693.6 acres, Pope Park at 79 acres, laid out by the Olmsted Brothers in 1898, and Colt Park at 114 acres. Then there is the river, which is the reason our yard is where it is. The Connecticut River crested at 37.6 feet here in March 1936, the flood of record, and at 35.4 feet in the September 1938 hurricane, and the answer was the US Army Corps of Engineers Hartford Local Protection Project: about 3,000 acres protected by roughly 35,000 feet of earthfill dike and 4,400 feet of concrete floodwall, six stoplog structures, six pumping stations and the Park River conduit, begun in December 1938 and completed in August 1944, at a total cost of $71.5 million. A Greater Hartford Flood Commission covering Hartford, Bloomfield, West Hartford and Newington still looks after it, the South Meadows Dike included, and FEMA is redrawing the flood insurance rate maps for this area now. Greater Hartford around us is a patchwork: I-84, I-91 and Route 2 are the highways that matter, and West Hartford, East Hartford, Wethersfield, Newington, Bloomfield, Windsor, South Windsor, Manchester, Glastonbury, Rocky Hill, Farmington, Avon, Simsbury, Berlin and the city of New Britain each keep their own arrangements, their own permits and their own transfer station or none at all, because Connecticut has 169 towns and no county government layer doing solid waste — county government was abolished on 1 October 1960 and the Census Bureau retired the counties in June 2022. The regional body is the Capitol Region Council of Governments, which all of those towns belong to alongside Hartford, but it does not run waste facilities. All of that housing generates debris, and we would rather it left less behind than it otherwise would — which is why we pull scrap metal, clean wood, cardboard and clean brick and concrete out of loads instead of tipping the lot, cardboard and scrap metal being mandatory recyclables in this state in any case, why we tell customers to pull the salvage first, the solid doors, the hardware, the fixtures worth rehoming, and why clean vegetative debris rides as its own separate load for composting or grinding.
About Heeny & Co Dumpster Rental
Who owns Heeny & Co Dumpster Rental?
Declan Heeny, who founded the company in 2014 and still runs it from our yard on 192 Ledyard St in Hartford. We are independently owned — not a franchise, not a broker reselling somebody else’s trucks, and not a national call centre routing your job to whoever bids lowest that morning.
Are you a broker or do you own your trucks?
We own our trucks and our containers and we employ our drivers. That matters because a broker cannot promise you a delivery window — they are passing your job to a third party and hoping. When we say Tuesday morning, our dispatcher is looking at our own truck.
What areas do you actually serve?
Hartford and roughly a 35 mile radius across the Capitol Region: West Hartford, East Hartford, Wethersfield, Newington, Bloomfield and Windsor on our doorstep, South Windsor, Manchester and Glastonbury across the river, Rocky Hill, Berlin and the city of New Britain to the south and south-west, and Farmington, Avon and Simsbury west and north-west. South Meadows and Frog Hollow are Hartford neighbourhoods rather than separate towns — our yard is in South Meadows — and we run daily to them and to Downtown, Asylum Hill, Parkville, Barry Square, the West End, South Green, Behind the Rocks, Upper Albany, Blue Hills, Clay-Arsenal, Sheldon-Charter Oak, the South End, South West, Northeast and North Meadows. Because Connecticut has 169 towns and no county solid-waste layer at all, every one of those towns writes its own rules, and all fifteen sit with Hartford in the Capitol Region Council of Governments. It is one phone number for all of it. Our full service area is listed here.
Are you licensed and insured?
Yes on both. We carry commercial general liability, commercial auto and workers’ compensation cover, and we are licensed to haul solid waste in Connecticut. Contractors and property managers can request a certificate of insurance when setting up an account and we will usually turn it around the same day.
Do you handle commercial accounts?
We do — builders, remodelers, roofers, property management companies, restaurants and retail. Standing accounts get priority scheduling, next-day swap-outs and consolidated monthly invoicing. See commercial dumpster rental or call to set one up.
Talk to a real person
Talk to Declan or one of the team
No call queue, no chat bot, no form that promises a response within one business day. Call the number and a person in Hartford picks up.
Serving Hartford, the Capitol Region and Greater Hartford · Mon–Fri 6:30am–5pm, Sat 7am–1pm