How to get rid of appliances in Sacramento

The short answer

Carry-out from any floor, loading, hauling, refrigerant recovery and disposal are all inside those numbers. The minimum per visit is $75.

Step one: prep it, two days out

This is the part that actually goes wrong, and it goes wrong on the morning rather than in advance.

• Empty and defrost a fridge or freezer two days before. Not the night before. A chest freezer that has been running for fifteen years in an Elk Grove garage holds more ice than you think, and defrosting it while a crew waits in your driveway is nobody's good morning.
• Drain a washer hose and disconnect the supply lines.
• Drain a tank water heater. A full one is enormously heavy, and in a raised-foundation house on the grid it may have to come up through a hatch or out a narrow utility door.
• Pull a window AC unit down before the day if you can do it safely. If not, say so and the crew will.
• Take the doors off a fridge only if it is going to sit outside overnight. Otherwise leave them on. Taped shut is fine.

Step two: disconnect what needs a trade

Two things are not ours and should never be improvised.

Gas. A gas range, a gas dryer or a gas water heater has to be disconnected and capped by someone qualified. Once that is done, a gas range is $137 and a tank water heater is $131.

Hardwired electrical. A built-in oven, a cooktop or an outdoor condenser unit on a dedicated circuit needs an electrician first.

Everything downstream of that, the lifting and the hauling, is included in the flat price.

Refrigerant, and why there is no surcharge for it

Refrigerators, freezers, window and portable AC units, heat pumps and condensers all contain refrigerant, and there are federal rules requiring it to be recovered by a certified technician before the shell is processed.

That is precisely why the free routes go quiet on these items. A scrapper cruising an alley off Franklin Boulevard will happily take a dryer and will leave the fridge sitting there.

It is handled on our side, at facilities set up for it. There is no refrigerant line, no EPA fee and no handling charge on the price list. A standard refrigerator is $164, full stop.

Retailer haul-away only works on delivery day

If you are replacing the appliance, the cheapest route is the delivery crew taking the old one, and it costs nothing but a checkbox. The catch is absolute: it has to be on the order at the time you place it. It cannot be added on the doorstep, and the crew has a route.

Three ways it falls over in this city specifically:

• Stairs. A delivery team will swap a washer in a ground-floor laundry closet in a Natomas tract home. Extracting an old stacked unit from a second-floor closet in a converted Midtown Victorian, down a turning staircase and out through an alley gate, gets declined.
• Gas. Most delivery crews will not disconnect gas. If nobody has capped it, the old range stays.
• The second one. Haul-away covers the appliance you are replacing. The garage fridge is not part of the deal.

That last point is the single most common reason people in this metro end up booking a pickup for an appliance anyway.

The Sacramento garage appliance graveyard

Almost every long-held house in Carmichael, Citrus Heights, Fair Oaks, Orangevale, the Pocket and Elk Grove has at least one appliance in the garage that is not in use: a second fridge, a chest freezer, the washer that got replaced, a window unit from before the central air went in.

The heat is what kills them. An uninsulated garage here sits above 110 degrees through weeks of July and August, and a compressor working against that ambient has a shorter life than the label suggests. Appliance calls in this city spike in September, about two weeks after the thing actually died in the August run.

Worked example, an Orangevale garage cleared of the lot: Refrigerator (Standard) $164 + Freezer (Chest) $146 + Washer $133 = $443. That is above the half-truck rate of $431, so it books at $431.

Smaller: Mini Fridge $115 + Microwave (Countertop) $30 = $145, which is the price, since it is over the $75 minimum and under the quarter truck at $241.

Air conditioning, the Sacramento special

This is a town where cooling is not optional, and the hardware turns over accordingly. Older homes across the grid, Tahoe Park and the postwar suburbs have been through window units, then portable units, then central air, and frequently the older equipment is still in the garage or still bolted in a back bedroom window.

Window AC Unit (Small, under 8k BTU) is $87, Window AC Unit (Large, 8k+ BTU) is $109, Portable AC Unit is $85, and an outdoor AC Condenser / Heat Pump is $115 once it is disconnected.

If you have older roof-mounted or whole-house equipment, send photos and we will price it before anything is dispatched rather than guess at it here.

Booking it

Tell us the appliance, whether it is disconnected, which floor it is on, and whether the truck works the street, the alley or the driveway. The number comes back before dispatch and it is the number on the invoice.

In summer, take the early slot. In a triple-digit week, moving a fridge out of a closed garage at two in the afternoon is a genuinely bad idea and the price is identical at seven in the morning.

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