Skip Size?

[jawa]

I am taking down a garden wall which is about 21ft long and 5ft high.

What size skip will I need?

2, 3, 4, 5 Tonne

-- jawa

[AlexW]

Its the volume that's important...

Work out the volume 6.3m * 1.5m * (say) 0.1m = 1 cubic meter approx.

Allow for the fact that it won't be as compact as where it is now. Say double that to 2m3.

Ask skip co. for 2 cubic meter capacity.

Or get a HI-AB to pick it up (which will take a lot more and can be cheaper for rubble).

HTH,

Alex.

[Bob Mannix]

A single brick wall that size with no piers would be about 2 tonnes. Add piers and other crap and 3-4 tonnes would be safe, I guess. If it's double brick with piers then 5 tonnes might be too small. Unfortunately brick doesn't pack well in skips if you just chuck it in and it will be the volume when skipped that will be the determining factor I suspect.

Bob Mannix

[Christian McArdle]

And tell them it is pure hardcore, too, for the best price. If you have a suitable tow vehicle, you may find it cheaper to hire/borrow a trailer and take a trip or two to your local tip. Mine (Reading) even lets you jump the queue if you've only got hardcore.

Christian.

[ben]

Go for a 3 ton, you can get rid of some crap you have lying around the house as well. :-)

[Phil]

Hmmm.. local skip companies here do 2,4,6,8,10,12 yard skips. The 'normal' builder's skip you see about is the 6 yard version. My 24m x 5 block high block wall plus foundations just took most of an 8 yard skip....

[Dave Fawthrop]

| > Ask skip co. for 2 cubic meter capacity. | | And tell them it is pure hardcore, too, for the best price. If you have a | suitable tow vehicle, you may find it cheaper to hire/borrow a trailer and | take a trip or two to your local tip. Mine (Reading) even lets you jump the | queue if you've only got hardcore.

Moving a ton of hardcore from a trailer to the huge container at the council tip is *very* hard work. I have done it :-(

[AlexW]

So have I/we...

Unless you do it a bit at a time, all the plaster was removed from my house by hand in rubbles sacks and hanballed into the back of the missuses Ford KA and disposed of at the local tip.

She could run boot loads to the tip faster than I could get it off the wall you see!

A HI-AB is easiest as you don't even need to lift it into a skip, 3 weeks ago I had 9 tons of earth, concrete and stone removed that way for less than a midi-skip! Need an accessible spot to plonk it all though until load up.

Alex.

[AlexW]

Still lost about 9lbs weight just doing the digging for this though. Soul destroying ... but not as much as the treadmill/stepper at the Gym ;-)

Alex.

[Christian McArdle]

Well, I've just shifted 5 tonnes from my back garden to the tip. No rear access, so I had to carry it through the house in buckets (convoluted route, no chance of a wheelbarrow).

Luckily, the hardcore section at the tip is separate from the main part. No queue. No lifting into the containers, just chuck it on the ground. Once or twice a day, a bulldozer comes along and shifts it into a big tidy pile. It did take 12 trips, though, including several loads of non-hardcore, garden waste and general. My trailer's big, but unbraked, so you can't exactly fill it with rubble before taking it away, although some of the cleaner stuff went in the back of the van.

Unloading the rubble at the tip was light relief, compared to getting it from the garden. (About a tonne of it was an old garden path that needed smashing up with Mr Sledge as well).

Christian.

[AlexW]

Ouch bucketing hurts dunnit!

My approx 3-4 tons of earth 2 years ago wen't through the house to the front 2 buckets at a time to "the pile". I bottled out of tipping it myself and called called the HI-AB man for the n'th time.

Luckily carpets (and doors had not gone in yet!). Also the five or six buckets destroyed were only 99p each.

If its any consolation the earth was full of stones and huge tree roots and was a sod (pun not intended) to dig out in the first place. Mr Axe and Mr Pick and Rusty the Saw needed on occasion!

Alex.

[Christian McArdle]

You should be more careful! I managed to only write off one B&Q "basket". I wish I'd noticed that I'd done so before using it to collect the waste water when fixing the sink U-bend, though.

Oh yes. The garden waste including a couple of tree stumps. Great fun digging those out by hand. At least that was last year, though. (The piles of rubble/waste had been getting larger over time...)

Christian.

[AlexW]

Yes mine were orange ones too, picked as the had had some prior abuse.

I hate that kind of digging!

Alex.

[ben]

Hehe! them supermarket trollys come in handy when you cant use a wheelbarrow.

[Christian McArdle]

No chance of getting a trolley through the house. Believe me. It was touch and go getting a person carrying two buckets!

Christian.

[Lobster]

Reminds me of when I once worked temporarily as a mini-skip truck driver, many moons ago... once I had to collect a skip, apparently loaded with rubble, but when I connected the chains and tried to lift the thing it wouldn't even budge. It was only the fact that the van stilts were dissapearing into the ground under the strain that I knew the lifting gear definitely hadn't failed on me. "What exactly have you got in here?" "Oh, just rubble and bricks" Anyway the punter was very unhappy that he had to remove a fairly large amount of his crud, but was a bit sheepish once the top layer of loose rubble had been removed, to reveal that almost the entire skip was neatly packed with bricks, almost like a solid block of dry-stone wall! God knows what it must have weighed!

David

[John Rumm]

One of our skip drivers recounted a tale of collecting a very heavy skip. He managed to get it up on the wagon, and took it to empty. What he did not know was that the top stuff was loose rubble etc, but the bottom 2/3rds had been filled with spare redimix which had then set!

As he tipped it, the loose stuff all fell out, but the concrete stayed put. This caused the balance of the skip to change and it tipped back toward the lorry again. The jib kept lifting however and got it to a point well past the vertical when it again reached the balance point and flipped back over. However it did so with such force that it actually yanked the whole lorry straight over the edge and into the pit.

Fortunately he had the presence of mind to duck as the saw the cab door he had left open approaching him at high speed!