20 Yard Dumpster Rental in Hartford, CT

A 20 yard roll-off is about twenty-two feet long, eight feet wide and roughly four and a half feet tall — six to eight pickup loads. It is the size most Hartford jobs land on, because it holds a whole flat's worth of material without the height that makes a taller box easy to overload. The footprint is the thing to check: twenty-two feet plus room for the truck is more drive than a narrow shared access between two multifamily houses usually offers.

• Capacity20 cubic yards
• Footprint22 ft x 8 ft x 4.5 ft
• Weight allowance3 – 4 tons
• Holds about~6 – 8 pickup truck loads

Why people choose the 20 yard

The 20 is the default here because it matches the most common job in the city. Hartford is eighty-one per cent multifamily and twenty-five point seven per cent owner-occupied, which means a very large share of the work is a single flat being emptied and turned between tenants: carpet, cabinets, a vanity, blinds, bedding, furniture the last tenant left, and the contents of a storage bay in the cellar. That is a mixed load, mostly bulky, with a proportion of heavy material through it, and a 20 absorbs it without needing a swap halfway. The same is true of a cellar and an attic done in one weekend, which is the other classic Hartford household job, and of a medium remodel where cabinetry, flooring and trim come out together. It is also the size most estate clearances of a smaller Hartford house end up needing, because bulky household contents fill volume a good deal faster than they build weight.

It also has the most forgiving weight behaviour of any size we run. A 10 will hit payload on rubble alone. A 30 or a 40 is tall enough that you can put four tons in it while it still looks half empty. A 20 is short enough to see into and big enough to hold a real job, which means a normally mixed load reaches the fill line and the payload at roughly the same time. That is a genuinely useful property on a Hartford clear-out, where the material is a mix of light bulky household goods and heavy old-house material: plaster from a pre-1950 wall, tile in a mortar bed, a cast-iron radiator or two, and whatever the cellar took in the last wet spring. Load the heavy material flat on the floor of the box and the bulky material on top, and it works. That balance is why we recommend this size more often than any other, and why we still ask what the material is before confirming it.

Where a 20 goes wrong is the drive rather than the load. Twenty-two feet of container plus the truck to place it needs about sixty feet of straight approach, roughly ten and a half feet of working width, and twenty feet or more of overhead. That is available on plenty of Hartford properties and unavailable on plenty of others, particularly the shared drives between two multifamily houses in Frog Hollow, Barry Square and the South End where the access is a single car wide and there is a porch on both sides. If the drive will not take it, the choice is a 15 with a planned swap or a street set under the city's Obstruction Permit. Both are workable. What does not work is a driver arriving to find sixteen feet of usable ground and a twenty-two foot box on the truck. Measure the usable ground before you ring, or send a photograph from the kerb, and we will tell you honestly whether a 20 will go where you want it.

Good fit for

• A whole flat turned over between tenants
• A cellar and an attic in the same weekend
• Medium remodels and multi-room work
• A substantial single-family roof tear-off
• Estate clearance of a smaller house
• Garage demolition and porch removal
• Mixed C and D on a small building site
• Large storm and brush clear-ups

Not the right size for

• Pure concrete, brick or block rubble
• Foundation spoil in any quantity
• A cellar full of wet contents
• A whole Perfect Six emptied at once
• Large commercial fit-outs
• Narrow shared drives under sixteen feet
• Sites with overhead limbs under twenty feet
• Jobs where only cardboard is coming out
• Anything containing asbestos
• Paint, adhesives, oils and tars
• Electronics and televisions
• Mattresses, which have their own route
• Grass clippings, banned in Connecticut
• Clean fill, excluded from C and D waste

Will it fit?

The 20 is where the driveway question starts to matter in Hartford. The box is about twenty-two feet long and the truck needs roughly sixty feet of straight approach to line up and back, about ten and a half feet of working width, and twenty feet or more of overhead clearance for the hoist. On a detached house with its own drive that is usually fine. On the narrow shared access between two multifamily houses, which is a very common arrangement here, it often is not, and a 15 with a planned swap is the better answer. Overhead is the constraint people forget: mature maple and oak arch over residential streets and the electrical service drop runs beneath them from the pole to the house, so a spot that looks open at eye level can be closed at twenty feet. Walk out and look up. Protection boards go under the wheels on every set and we photograph the approach on arrival, because most drives in this city already carry cracking and spalling from decades of freeze-thaw. Raised granite kerbing changes where the boards go. On placement, Connecticut has no per-dumpster fire permit; the rule is IFC 2021 section 304.3.3, which keeps a container of 1.5 cubic yards or more out of buildings and at least five feet from combustible walls, openings and roof eave lines. If the box has to go in the street, most Hartford residential blocks have parking on both sides, and it needs an Obstruction Permit from the Public Works Permit Division at $50 plus three cents per square foot per day, on 860-757-9970.

Before delivery, move cars and bins, mark irrigation heads and septic lids, and tell us about new concrete, soft ground, a steep grade or low power lines. Our delivery and driveway protection guide covers all of it.

Compare all four sizes