Dumpster Rental in Windsor, CT

Roll-off containers for Windsor homes and jobsites

Windsor is the oldest English settlement in Connecticut, founded in 1633, and it wears it well — the town green, Palisado Avenue and the streets around the First Church hold a concentration of eighteenth and nineteenth-century building that is unusual this close to a city. It sits north of Hartford where the Farmington River comes in to meet the Connecticut, which is both why the settlement went there and why parts of the town have a long, well-documented relationship with high water.

North of the historic core, Windsor is a broad town with several distinct villages in it. Poquonock and Rainbow sit out toward the Farmington River, Wilson and Deerfield lie toward the Hartford line, and the Day Hill Road corridor on the western side is a large modern commercial and distribution district that generates a very different kind of container work — office strip-outs, warehouse clearances, fit-outs and roof replacements rather than kitchens and cellars.

The residential work is split between the old and the post-war. An eighteenth-century house on Palisado Avenue and a 1958 ranch in Wilson are opposite problems: the first is a clearance job with tight access, low branches and a lot of things that ought to be looked at before they are thrown away; the second is a straightforward drive delivery with a full basement to empty. Both sit on a 42-inch frost line, which is why full basements are standard here and why so many Windsor jobs begin in the cellar.

Storms are the wild card. Tropical Storm Irene on 28 August 2011 is the one people still measure against — a 44-knot gust recorded at Windsor Locks just north of here, and outages running as long as a week in places across Connecticut. Wind here means hardwood down: maple, oak, ash and white pine.

What we know about working in Windsor

Windsor divides into three kinds of job and each has its own container answer. The historic streets need small boxes and careful placement: narrow drives, granite kerbing, low limbs over the approach, and a lot of houses where the only flat ground is the street. We want a photograph before we commit a truck. The post-war villages are simple drive deliveries. The Day Hill Road corridor is commercial work, where the constraint is usually the loading area and the schedule rather than the ground. On what goes in the box, the Connecticut position is straightforward: mixed construction and demolition debris in one roll-off is legal and is what CT DEEP recommends, with corrugated cardboard and scrap metal separated out as mandatory recyclables under CGS §22a-241b and RCSA §22a-241b-2. There is no Connecticut recycling quota on the facilities that take it and no state ban list to work through — the real disposal bans here are electronics under CGS §22a-636 and grass clippings under CGS §22a-208v. What must stay out is asbestos, clean fill, hazardous waste, radioactive material and liquids including adhesives, paints, oils and tars. Paint has its own network: PaintCare has operated in Connecticut since July 2013, funded by a point-of-sale fee, with drop-off sites across the state — see paintcare.org. Windsor runs its own municipal arrangements, as every Connecticut town does, and none of them are built for renovation debris. Five feet clear of combustible walls and eave lines under IFC 2021 §304.3.3, and Call Before You Dig under CGS §16-345 before any excavation.

• Regionthe Capitol Region
• Distance from our yard8 miles north of our Ledyard Street yard
• Main routesI-91 north from the Hartford ramps, off at the Windsor exits for the town centre
• Typical deliverySame or next day

Getting a truck to you

I-91 north from the Hartford ramps is the fast line and gets us to the Windsor exits in about twenty minutes outside the peaks. For the older river streets we often prefer Main Street north through Hartford and up the river road, which is slower but drops us where we want to be. Route 159 along Palisado Avenue serves the north end, and Route 305 crosses the town for Poquonock and the Bloomfield side. Before we book we want the address, whether the container sits on a drive or the street, the drive width and surface, the overhead clearance — that matters most on the historic streets — and a clear description of what is going in.

Routes we run: I-91 north from the Hartford ramps, off at the Windsor exits for the town centre, Main Street north through Hartford and on up the river road into Windsor, Route 159 north along Palisado Avenue for the north end and the Farmington River crossing, Route 305 east and west across the town for Poquonock and the Bloomfield side.

Landmarks and neighborhoods we work around

Permits, streets and placement in Windsor

On a private driveway in Windsor the placement question is not really a permit question at all, and that surprises nearly everybody. Connecticut has no per-dumpster fire permit. The only rubbish entry in the state fire code permit table is a permit to operate a commercial rubbish-handling business, and that one is ours to hold rather than yours. What the state has instead is a placement rule. Under IFC 2021 §304.3.3, adopted in the 2022 Connecticut State Fire Safety Code, a container with an individual capacity of 1.5 cubic yards or more must not be stored in a building or placed within five feet of combustible walls, openings or combustible roof eave lines. Five feet is the figure, whatever the dumpster pages written for other states tell you. Every roll-off we run is well over 1.5 cubic yards, so the rule reaches a 10 yard in a Windsor driveway just as much as a 40 yard on a commercial site, and it is the reason the open side of the drive beats the narrow gap beside the house. Keep the box clear of exits, fire-apparatus access and hydrants as well, and no flammable or combustible liquids go in it. A local fire marshal can add requirements of his own, so if the only workable spot is tight against the building, it is worth a call to the fire marshal covering Windsor before we deliver. For a container that has to sit in the public way in Hartford the instrument is the Obstruction Permit from the city’s Public Works Permit Division — temporary obstruction of the public right-of-way, $50 plus $0.03 per square foot per day under the published Rules and Specifications, with a $10,000 performance bond and a certificate of liability insurance. That document never uses the word dumpster, so ring the Permit Division on 860-757-9970 and ask how they want it handled. Outside Hartford the same call goes to the town’s own public works or engineering office, because the answer follows the address rather than any county line. Sidewalks, hydrants and fire lanes stay clear either way. Sort the approval before you book the delivery. It is a ten-minute call that saves a week.

Two more rules reach every job we run, and both are state rules rather than local ones. The first is asbestos, and Connecticut splits it three ways. The Department of Public Health takes the abatement notification and licenses the people who do the work, on ten days’ notice. CT DEEP issues the $300 Special Waste and Asbestos Disposal Authorization that lets the material move. The DAS Office of the State Fire Marshal licenses demolition contractors. The trap on an older Windsor house is that Connecticut is stricter than the federal rule: RCSA §19a-332a-1 defines a facility to include residential buildings, single-family homes expressly included, so there is no owner-occupied carve-out here, and a demolition notification is required for any structure taken down, whether or not asbestos is present. CT DPH publishes a factsheet on asbestos-containing siding shingles in particular, which is a live issue on pre-1940 stock. We cannot take asbestos-containing material in any container. Anything built before 1978 also carries lead paint under the federal RRP rule, and lead paint chips are one of the materials Hartford’s bulky programme refuses outright. The second rule is what may not ride in a construction load: CGS §22a-208x excludes asbestos, clean fill, hazardous waste, radioactive material and liquids — adhesives, paints, oils and tars from construction and demolition waste, and corrugated cardboard and scrap metal are mandatory recyclables under CGS §22a-241b, so they come out of the load and cannot be mixed back in once they are separated. Everything else can be commingled — CT DEEP’s own guidance is that most construction waste is best managed in one roll-off taken to a processing facility. That is why we ask what is going in the box before we quote, and it is not fussiness. Before anything is dug, trenched or a stump pulled, call Call Before You Dig on 811, as CGS §16-345 et seq. requires; Connecticut is CBYD territory. Our permit and placement guide walks through the whole process, and collection, drop-off and bulk-item details are published by the City of Hartford.

The ground is the other local variable, and here it is the frost line that decides both the container size and the approach. Connecticut works to a 42-inch frost depth, so footings in Windsor reach three and a half feet regardless of what sits on top — and once the hole is that deep, a full basement costs almost nothing more, which is why so much of the pre-war housing here has one. Two practical consequences follow. A cleanout starts a floor lower than a sizing guide written for the south would assume: the basement and the attic are the job, and what comes up the bulkhead stairs is storm windows, paint tins, furniture, a workbench and thirty years of boxes. And frost heave, the spring thaw and plain groundwater keep the heavy work coming — footing and foundation spoil, broken concrete and brick out of a cellar floor or a front walk, plaster off a gutted six-family, and wet basement contents after water has come in. All of that is heavy for its volume, so it rides in a small container, often in two hauls rather than one big box, and the wet clay it comes out of weighs a good deal more in April than it does in August. Access moves with the season as well: snowbanks and the plough windrow narrow a drive that took a 30 yard in October, granite kerbing and cars parked both sides of the street decide how much swing the truck has on the older blocks, shared drives between multifamily houses are tighter than they look, and on gravel approaches we would rather move you a day than leave ruts through soft spring ground. Where it all ends up is the part people assume and get wrong. The MIRA trash-to-energy plant in Hartford’s South Meadows has closed, Connecticut has no active MSW landfills, and the state exports a large share of its municipal solid waste — so disposal here is a distance and logistics problem rather than a question of what is banned. A mixed construction load in one box is perfectly legal, and it is what CT DEEP recommends. Household quantities are a different route: Hartford residents take those to the Bulky Waste and Recycling Center, 180 Leibert Road, Tuesday to Saturday, 8:45 a.m. to 1:45 p.m., on a green permit for recyclables, free; a blue residential permit at $10.00 for four visits; or a red commercial permit at $50.00 plus a per-load charge — half a ton $40, three-quarters $60, a ton $85 — and that red permit names handymen and landscapers and stops at a one-ton load or a 16-foot trailer. Mattresses and electronics are free there, because Connecticut’s producer-funded stewardship programmes pay for them. Paint, solvents, automotive fluids, batteries and pool chemicals never ride in a container: household hazardous waste for Hartford goes to the MDC Operations Facility at 125 Maxim Road. Every town around us answers all of this differently, because Connecticut has 169 towns, each running its own solid waste arrangements with no county layer above them — the answer changes at the town line.

Sizes we deliver to Windsor