TV and electronics disposal in Tampa

The short answer

Minimum visit is $75. A single small TV at $62 bills at the $75 minimum, so it is worth adding the monitor at $58 or the box of cables and old routers at $77 while the truck is there.

Why you cannot just bin a television

Televisions and monitors are not regular household trash anywhere, and curbside programs generally will not take them. The older ones contain leaded glass; the newer flat panels contain backlighting, circuit boards and a mix of metals that belong in the electronics stream rather than in a landfill.

Your options are a county electronics recycling drop-off — check your county's solid waste page for current locations, hours and whether there are quantity limits for residents — a retailer take-back program if one applies to your device, or a scheduled pickup.

The catch with drop-offs is transport. A 65-inch panel does not fit in a sedan, it is awkward for one person, and it cracks if you lay it flat. Which is how so many of them end up leaning against a garage wall for two years.

Tampa is the lightning capital, and your electronics know it

The Bay area sits in the most lightning-prone corner of the country. Sea-breeze thunderstorms build over the peninsula nearly every summer afternoon, and a strike anywhere near the grid puts a surge through everything plugged in.

The pattern is familiar to anyone who has lived here a few years: the television survives, the cable box and the router do not; or the TV survives the strike but dies three weeks later. Then the outage arrives, the house comes back up, and something else has quietly stopped working.

The result is that Tampa households accumulate dead electronics faster than most places. The box of electronics at $77 exists for exactly this — surge-killed routers, cable boxes, game consoles, chargers, an old laptop and the cables nobody can identify, all in one box, one price.

Humidity kills what lightning misses

The second Tampa-specific factor. Electronics stored in a garage, an attic or a detached shed in this climate corrode. High relative humidity most of the year, plus big daily temperature swings in an unconditioned garage, means condensation on circuit boards. Near the bay and the beaches, salt in the air accelerates it.

So the plan people have — put the old TV in the garage in case we need it for the guest room — very rarely works out. Two Tampa summers later the thing does not power on, and it is now exactly as much of a disposal problem as it was when it worked, minus any resale value it had.

If you are not going to use it within a season, price it and move it on. TV stand goes too at $96, and that is usually the piece of furniture nobody wants either.

The snowbird condo tube TV

There is a specific artefact in this market: the old rear-projection or tube television in a seasonal condo in Clearwater, St. Pete Beach, Sun City Center or Palm Harbor. It was fine in 2006, it has been used for four months a year ever since, and it weighs a very great deal.

These are the hardest televisions to get rid of. They are heavy, awkward, worth nothing, and often sit on a matching entertainment center from the same era. Nobody in the building wants it and the thrift stores will not take it.

Priced: a TV under 42 inches is $62 regardless of whether it is a flat panel or a tube, and the entertainment center it lives in is $96. That is $62 + $96 = $158 to make the living-room wall usable again — and in a rental turnover that is the difference between listing the unit as updated or not.

Wipe your data before it leaves

This is on you, not on us, and it is the step people skip.

• Computers and laptops: sign out of accounts, then do a factory reset or wipe the drive. If you are genuinely worried, remove the drive and keep it.
• Smart televisions: factory reset. They hold your streaming logins, and modern sets hold more than people expect.
• Routers: reset to factory. They hold your network configuration.
• Printers: many commercial copiers and printers have internal storage. Reset before the $97 pickup.
• Phones and tablets: sign out of the account first, then wipe. In that order.

Do it the night before, not while a crew is standing in your doorway.

Office and small-business electronics

Westshore, downtown Tampa, the Gateway area and the office parks along I-75 generate a steady stream of this work. A commercial copier or printer is $97. A computer monitor is $58 each — an office refresh is usually a dozen of them. A cubicle or office workstation is $163, an executive desk $208, an office chair $61, a conference table $260.

A small six-desk office clearing monitors, chairs and a copier: six monitors at $58, six office chairs at $61, one copier at $97 is $348 + $366 + $97 = $811. A full truck is $732. On a job that size, buy the truck.

If the office is in a tower, the building will want a certificate of insurance and a booked service-elevator window before anything moves. Start that before you book the truck.

Booking it

Tell us the screen size bracket, because that is the only thing that changes the price: under 42 inches $62, 42 to 65 inches $68, over 65 inches $73. Tell us if there is a stand or entertainment center going too, at $96.

If it is one small item, look around first. The $75 minimum applies whether we take one television or five, so the marginal cost of clearing out the whole media cabinet in the same visit is just the item prices — and a box of electronics at $77 will absorb a remarkable amount of drawer contents.

Frequently asked questions