Who picks up old appliances in Tampa

The short answer

Minimum visit $75. A countertop microwave at $30 on its own still bills at the minimum.

Your four options, honestly ranked

• Retailer haul-away. The best deal available, with one catch: it only works on delivery day, and only for the appliance the new one replaces. Buy a fridge, tick the haul-away box, they take the old one when they bring the new one. Miss that window and the offer is gone.
• Scrap collectors. Some will take a dry steel appliance off a Tampa curb for free because of the metal value. They will not touch anything with refrigerant and they are not a schedule you can rely on.
• Municipal collection. Check your city or county's bulk-pickup page — Tampa, Temple Terrace, unincorporated Hillsborough and each Pinellas city run different programs, and several handle refrigerant-bearing appliances separately from other bulk items.
• Flat-price pickup. $164 for a fridge, scheduled, carried out from wherever it is, refrigerant handled.

The retailer haul-away trap

This catches people constantly in the Bay area, particularly in new builds in Wesley Chapel, Riverview and Apollo Beach where the kitchen gets upgraded a room at a time.

The retailer's free haul-away is tied to the delivery. It is not a service you can call back for. Say no on the day because your brother-in-law was going to take the old fridge to his place in Brandon, and three months later the old fridge is still in your garage taking up a bay, running up power, and slowly going musty inside.

It is also normally one-for-one. Replace the fridge and they take the fridge; they are not taking the dead chest freezer next to it. That freezer is $146 with us, and there is no version of the retailer offer that covers it.

Refrigerant is our problem, not a surcharge

Refrigerators, freezers, window units, portable units and outdoor condensers contain refrigerant, and there are federal rules about how it is recovered before the unit is scrapped. That is not optional and it is not something you should attempt in a driveway.

We handle it. It is built into the price. There is no refrigerant fee, no EPA fee, no environmental surcharge on our invoice — a standard fridge is $164 and that is the whole number.

This is the main reason the free-scrapper route falls over. Anyone taking a fridge off your curb for the steel is not recovering the refrigerant, and you do not want your old appliance in that chain.

The Tampa garage fridge

Almost every older house in Carrollwood, Temple Terrace, Seminole, Town 'n' Country and the Pinellas mid-century neighborhoods has one: the second refrigerator in the garage. It holds drinks, it holds the hurricane-season overflow, and it is usually twenty years old.

Two Tampa-specific realities. A garage refrigerator in this climate works far harder than one in the kitchen, because the garage is not conditioned and sits well above room temperature for half the year — so they fail early. And after a multi-day outage, the contents of a garage freezer are a genuinely serious clean-up problem; the smell does not come out, and the unit is usually done.

Standard fridge $164, side-by-side or French door $183, chest freezer $146, upright freezer $149. Empty it before we come.

Water heaters, AC units and salt air

With no basements, Tampa water heaters live in the garage, a utility closet or occasionally the attic. A tank water heater is $131. Drain it before removal day if you can — a full tank is a great deal heavier than an empty one and it will leave a trail across your garage floor.

Air conditioning is the other constant. Older bungalows in Seminole Heights and Ybor casitas often still run window units: $87 under 8,000 BTU, $109 for 8,000 and up. A portable unit is $85. An outdoor condenser or heat pump is $115 — and if you live near the bay, on the beaches, in Davis Islands or anywhere the salt air reaches, the outdoor unit's fins corrode faster than the compressor fails, which is why so many Bay area condensers get replaced looking superficially fine.

Dehumidifiers are $77, and in this metro almost everyone has owned one that died.

Laundry: the stacked-unit question

Washer $133, dryer $128. Together, priced separately, that is $133 + $128 = $261. A stacked washer/dryer combo — a single cabinet unit, common in Tampa condos, Ybor lofts and the small downtown apartments — is $189 as one item.

Know which you have before booking. Two separate machines sitting one on top of the other on a stacking kit are two items, not a combo.

Disconnect first if you can: water supply off, hoses off, dryer vent detached, gas line shut off by someone qualified if it is a gas dryer. Crews will move a disconnected appliance immediately; a connected one adds time and, in a second-floor Wesley Chapel laundry room, adds the risk of a water mess on your floor.

Doing it in one visit

Appliances rarely go one at a time. A typical Bay area kitchen and garage refresh: standard fridge $164, electric range $134, dishwasher $109, countertop microwave $30, plus the dead garage chest freezer $146. That is $164 + $134 + $109 + $30 + $146 = $583.

Compare that to a three-quarter truck at $587 or a five-eighths at $513. Appliances are dense and heavy but they do not take much truck space, so on an appliance-only job the itemized route usually wins. It flips the other way the moment cabinets and countertops join the list — laminate countertop is $56 a section, stone $111 a section, construction debris $120.

Either way you can do the sum before you book.

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