Sizing
What Size Dumpster Do I Need? A Melbourne, FL Sizing Guide
A Space Coast operator's breakdown of 10, 15, 20, 30 and 40 yard roll-offs: footprints, weight limits and why heavy Florida debris means a smaller container more often than you would think.
Every week somebody calls the yard on Industry Drive, opens with "just send me the biggest one you've got," and is surprised when I talk them down two sizes. On Space Coast jobs the container that fails you is almost never the one that was too small by volume — it is the one that hit its weight ceiling with three feet of freeboard still showing. Block, stucco, terrazzo, pool deck and barrel tile are dense material. You run out of pounds long before you run out of cubic yards.
The sizing conversation here is genuinely different from the one you would have up north. There are no basements to empty, half the demo debris is masonry, the roofs are heavier, and driveways beachside in Indialantic and Melbourne Beach will not physically accept a 22-foot box no matter how much you want one. This guide walks the five sizes we run — 10, 15, 20, 30 and 40 yard — and tells you which one actually fits your job.
Weight beats volume on almost every Florida job
A roll-off has two limits: how much it holds and how much it can legally leave your driveway carrying. Truck and container together have to stay inside Florida's road weight limits, and the scale at the Sarno Road facility does not care how much room was left in the box.
Loose household junk — furniture, boxes, mattresses, closet contents — runs light. You will genuinely fill the volume first, and a bigger container is the right answer. But the moment the load includes block, stucco, broken terrazzo, pool deck, pavers, dirt or barrel tile, the arithmetic flips. A cubic yard of broken concrete runs well over a ton, and four yards of it will max out a container that would happily swallow twenty yards of sofa cushions.
That is why we put clean masonry, concrete, dirt and tile jobs in a 10 yard container as a matter of course. It looks small sitting in the driveway. It is the correct call, and it goes out legally loaded. If you are unsure whether your debris counts as heavy, our page on concrete and heavy debris disposal spells out what belongs in a dedicated heavy container and what can ride in a mixed load.
Size-by-size comparison
Footprints below are the box itself. Add roughly four to five feet at the back for the door to swing, and about sixty feet of straight approach plus overhead clearance for the truck to set it down and pick it up. Weight allowances are typical for our containers — heavy-debris loads are capped tighter, and we will tell you the exact allowance for your material when you book.
| Size | Footprint (L × W × H) | Typical weight allowance | Pickup-truck loads | Best-fit Melbourne jobs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10 yard | 12 × 8 × 3.5 ft | 1–2 tons | About 3 | Concrete, block, stucco, terrazzo, pool deck, brick pavers, dirt, barrel tile, small bathroom gut, single-room demo, tight beachside driveways |
| 15 yard | 16 × 8 × 4 ft | 2–3 tons | 4–5 | Garage cleanout, one-car carport, small kitchen tear-out, shingle tear-off up to roughly 15–18 squares, fence panel replacement, condo turnover |
| 20 yard | 22 × 8 × 4.5 ft | 3–4 tons | 6–8 | The workhorse. Whole-house cleanout, attic and garage together, mid-size remodel, most shingle re-roofs, flooring and drywall out of a 1,800–2,400 sq ft house |
| 30 yard | 22 × 8 × 6 ft | 4–5 tons | 9–12 | Full estate cleanout, large remodel, multi-room gut, commercial tenant fit-out, big storm cleanup with mixed construction debris |
| 40 yard | 22 × 8 × 8 ft | 5–6 tons | 14–16 | Bulky and light only. Screen enclosure cages, soffit and fascia, insulation, cabinetry, commercial cardboard and packaging, large-volume light demo |
Notice the pattern. The footprint stops growing after the 20 yard — the 20, 30 and 40 all sit on the same 22-foot floor, and only wall height changes. If your driveway fits a 20, it fits a 40; if it does not fit a 20, going bigger is not an option. That one fact settles more sizing calls than anything else. Full details are on our dumpster sizes page.
No basements — so where is the volume?
Florida houses are slab-on-grade. There is no basement, and that removes an entire floor of accumulated storage from the estimate. People moving down from the north routinely order a 30 for a cleanout that a 20 handles with room to spare, because they are mentally budgeting for a basement that does not exist.
For a straightforward two-car garage cleanout, a 15 yard is usually plenty. Add the attic and a shed and you are into 20 yard territory. A genuine whole-house estate cleanout — a long-held Eau Gallie or Melbourne Beach home with fifty years of contents — is where the 30 yard earns its keep, because household goods are bulky and light and you will genuinely fill the volume.
One caution on mid-century houses: pull back the carpet in a 1950s or 1960s Melbourne home and you may well find terrazzo. If you are breaking it out, that is a heavy load, and it belongs in a 10 yard on its own rather than mixed into a cleanout container.
Roof tear-offs: size by squares and layers
Re-roofing is enormous work in Brevard, driven by the insurance market and by the 25 percent rule that pushes a lot of repairs into full replacements. Roofers size by roofing square — 100 square feet of surface — and the material matters more than the square count.
| Roof material | Rough weight per square | Squares per 10 yd | Typical container |
|---|---|---|---|
| Asphalt three-tab, one layer | ~230–250 lb | 12–14 | 15 or 20 yard |
| Dimensional / architectural shingle | ~350–400 lb | 8–10 | 20 yard |
| Two layers of shingle | Double the above | Half the above | 20 yard, sized down |
| Concrete barrel tile | ~900–1,100 lb | 3–4 | 10 yard, often two or three swaps |
| Metal panel | ~100–150 lb | Volume-limited | 20 yard |
Barrel tile catches people out. It runs roughly three to four times the weight of a shingle square, so a tile roof that fits one 20 yard by volume needs a run of 10 yard containers by weight. We handle that with next-day swap-outs so the crew never stops. Our roofing containers are set up for exactly this, and there is a deeper walkthrough in the roofing tear-off dumpster size guide. Wind-uplift and secondary-water-barrier requirements are set by the Florida Building Code — those provisions get updated on a cycle, so confirm current requirements with the Florida Building Commission or your permit office before the job starts.
Screen enclosures: the one job that genuinely wants a 40
Almost every house here has a pool cage, and after a storm we pull a lot of them. A screen enclosure is aluminium extrusion and mesh — enormous in volume, almost weightless. A cage laid out flat is a sprawling pile of bent tubing that nests badly and eats far more room than its poundage suggests.
This is the honest case for the 40 yard. You will fill eight feet of wall height and never come close to the weight allowance. The same goes for soffit, fascia, blown insulation, vinyl and cabinetry.
What does not belong in that container is the concrete pool deck or the shell. Mixing them means a heavy load in a tall box that cannot legally leave, so we stage a 40 for the cage and a 10 for the deck. Our notes on pool and screen enclosure demolition debris cover the sequencing.
Hurricane debris: vegetative material rides separately
Season runs June 1 to November 30, and Brevard has taken real hits — Matthew in 2016, Irma in 2017, then Ian and Nicole in 2022. Nicole chewed the dune line from Satellite Beach down through Indialantic and generated months of work.
The sizing mistake after a storm is treating it as one pile. Florida separates yard trash from solid waste, and vegetative debris — palm fronds, limbs, hedge trimmings, grass — has to go as a clean load to a yard-waste or mulching facility. Mix it into a construction load and the load gets rejected or reclassified at the scale, and that is a wasted trip for everybody. Plan on two containers: one for yard waste removal and one for the fence panels, shingles, soffit and drywall.
County debris-management contracts handle right-of-way pickup after a declared event, but it is slow and it does not touch anything you carry out of the house yourself. If you have water intrusion, the mould window in this climate is roughly 24 to 48 hours, so a container on site the same day matters more than getting the size perfect. There is more on that in our guide to hurricane and storm debris cleanup, and the Florida Division of Emergency Management and Brevard County post current guidance during an activation — storm-period rules change fast, so check them rather than relying on what happened last season.
Will it physically fit? Driveways, sand and access
Sizing is not just debris. Beachside driveways in Melbourne Beach, Indialantic, Indian Harbour Beach and Satellite Beach are frequently short, narrow and surfaced in shell or pavers, and a lot of them will take a 10 or a 15 and nothing longer. Older streets in Historic Downtown Melbourne and Eau Gallie have the same problem, plus low oak canopy the hoist arm cannot clear.
Ground matters too. Sandy soil and a high water table mean a loaded truck ruts soft sand and wet turf easily, so we stay on hard surface and put protection boards under every container as standard on shell, paver and asphalt drives alike.
A few more things that shape the answer:
- HOA rules. Suntree, Viera, Baytree and the beachside condo associations often set placement rules, day limits or an approval step. Confirm with yours before booking — those rules get amended.
- Street placement. A container in the public right-of-way generally needs a city permit. Rules differ between Melbourne, West Melbourne and Palm Bay and they change, so check with the relevant city.
- Lagoon proximity. Jobs between the Indian River Lagoon and the Atlantic get watched closely — nothing stockpiles where runoff reaches a storm drain.
- Asbestos. Pre-1980 houses turn up asbestos in popcorn ceilings, floor tile and mastic, and pipe insulation. We cannot take asbestos-containing material in any container. Testing and abatement rules come from Florida DEP and the Department of Health — confirm current requirements with them before demo starts.
How to land on the right size in two minutes
- Name the heaviest material in the load. If it is masonry, tile, terrazzo, dirt or concrete, start at a 10 and plan swaps.
- Count the rooms or the squares. Household contents scale by room; roofs scale by square and layer count.
- Separate the vegetation. Always its own load.
- Measure the driveway. Length, width and overhead. If a 20 does not fit, nothing bigger does either.
- Round up only on light debris. On heavy debris, round down and swap.
Still unsure what is going in the box? Our guide to what can go in a dumpster in Brevard County covers the prohibited list — and leftover paint, solvents and household chemicals go to a county household hazardous waste drop-off, never into the container.
Talk it through with us
The fastest way to get this right is to describe the job out loud. Tell me what you are tearing out, roughly how big the house is and what the driveway looks like, and I will tell you which container to take — including when the answer is smaller than you expected. Collins & Co has worked Melbourne, Palm Bay, Viera, the beaches and the rest of Brevard since 2015: licensed and insured, locally owned, flat-rate pricing, protection boards standard, same-day and next-day delivery, and next-day swap-outs when a heavy load needs staging. Call Wes and the crew at (321) 341-7478, and we will size it, schedule it and get it on the ground.
Questions this guide did not answer? Call (321) 341-7478. We would rather spend two minutes on the phone than have you order the wrong container.