Dumpster Rental in Windsor, CO

Roll-off containers for Windsor homes and jobsites

Windsor is the second town in this service area with a county line under it. It is a home rule town in both Weld and Larimer counties, and like Johnstown it means the town name on your mail tells you nothing about which county government your address answers to. Inside the town limits, the Town of Windsor is the government that decides what may sit on its streets, on either side of the line. Outside the town, on county ground, the answer forks: Weld County Public Works on (970) 400-4000 for the east side, Larimer County Engineering on (970) 498-5709 for the west. Two agencies, two permit systems, two phone numbers, one town.

Here is the honest part, and it is the same on every page on this site except Johnstown’s. We could not verify whether the Town of Windsor licenses haulers, requires a container permit, or has a dumpster ordinance of its own. Johnstown’s rules are quoted on this site because they are published and we read them. They are Johnstown’s rules and they do not travel. Windsor is home rule, which under Article XX of the Colorado Constitution means it draws its powers from its own charter and can legislate beyond state statute — so it is exactly the sort of town that is likely to have its own ordinance. Likely is not the same as verified. Call 970-674-2400, or start at windsorgov.com, and ask the Town directly. Then call us and we will work around whatever they tell you.

Windsor is also the town where this market’s weather stops being an abstraction. On 22 May 2008 a tornado went through and destroyed 78 homes, about five and a half miles in a straight line from Kelim. Weld County has recorded more tornadoes than any other county in the United States — 252 confirmed sightings between 1950 and 2011 — and most of them are short-lived landspouts forming along the Denver convergence zone rather than the long-track supercell tornadoes of the southern plains. That does not make the 2008 event less real for the people who rebuilt after it. Storm debris here is a genuine service line, not a marketing line, and the storm debris guide covers the order to work in.

The steadier driver is hail. Northeastern Colorado averages seven to nine hail days a year and sits inside the nation’s most hail-prone corridor, and hail on this stretch of the Front Range does not dent a roof here and there — it re-roofs whole subdivisions inside a fortnight. If you are in the middle of that, the two numbers we need are squares and layers, and the rule that never bends is that tear-off never goes in a 30 or a 40. Shingle reaches lawful road payload long before the box looks full.

Windsor is growing hard as well. Census estimates put it sixtieth in the nation for growth among places of 20,000 or more in 2024–25, at 4.7 percent in a single year, and it is one of three Weld County communities in the top five statewide. New subdivisions mean new-construction cleanup, first remodels and the ordinary churn of a town filling in. Kelim itself, incidentally, sits on the USGS Windsor 7.5-minute quadrangle — the mapmakers put our ground on Windsor’s sheet, which is as good a summary of the relationship as any.

What we know about working in Windsor

Start with what is settled everywhere, including here. On private property — a driveway, a yard, a parking lot — no right-of-way permit is in play at all. That is most residential placements, and it does not depend on which county you are in or which town you are in. What we cannot tell you is whether Windsor separately requires anything for a container on private ground, because we did not find a Windsor ordinance and we are not going to assume Johnstown’s applies. Ask the Town on 970-674-2400. If the box has to sit in a Windsor street, that is unambiguously a Town conversation and it happens before the truck is loaded, not after.

The fire-code answer is the one thing we can give you with confidence anywhere in this market, because it does not come from the town. The International Fire Code sets a five-foot separation between a container of any real size and combustible walls, openings or combustible roof eave lines — § 304.3.5 of the 2024 edition at 1.5 cubic yards, § 304.3.4 at 1.0 cubic yard with a noncombustible exception. Every roll-off is far over both. The edition adopted and the district enforcing it vary across this service area, and we could not verify which edition Windsor’s fire district enforces — but the five feet is the same in every edition we could check, so that is what we work to. Ask your district if the placement is tight.

Then the county fork, which is the thing that makes Windsor different from a single-county town. If your job is outside the town limits on county ground, you need to know which county. On the Weld side, remember that Weld County adopts no fire code at all — its own ordinance says the International Fire Code “shall apply only when adopted by a local fire district and shall not be enforced under this Building Code.” So for a rural Weld property the right call about a fire-code question is the fire protection district, not the county, and district boundaries do not follow municipal boundaries. On the Larimer side, Larimer County Engineering issues right-of-way, access and floodplain permits and quotes ten business days on all of them; its published permit material does not address containers, so we give you the number and claim nothing: (970) 498-5709.

Building code, again, needs a jurisdiction on it. Colorado has no statewide residential building code. Weld County’s 2024 package takes effect 15 June 2026 and Larimer County’s on 1 January 2026, and what Windsor itself has adopted we did not establish. Both counties publish a 30-inch frost line, which is the number that actually changes a dumpster order: footings, water services and sewer laterals are set at least that deep, so a foundation or sewer dig here yields materially more spoil than the same job in a warmer state, and dirt is a weight problem rather than a volume one. That usually means a 10-yard loaded low rather than a 20 loaded high.

For disposal, the short version: electronics are banned from Colorado landfills outright, since 1 July 2013 under C.R.S. § 25-17-303. Tires are refused at the gate here, and state rules require registration to transport ten or more waste tires at all. There is no Colorado yard-waste landfill ban — that is a Southeastern rule that does not exist here — and the landfills serving this area accept yard waste, though A-1 Organics composts on 970-454-3492 if you would rather. Household hazardous waste on the Weld side is free to Weld County residents at Greeley or Dacono, 200 pounds a visit, on (970) 400-2217, and electronics and appliances are not accepted there either. A Windsor household on the Larimer side of the line does not qualify as a Weld resident, and goes to the Larimer Central Diversion & Transfer Station in Fort Collins on 970-498-5772 instead. One town, two answers, and it is worth knowing which one is yours before you load the truck.

• RegionWeld and Larimer Counties
• Distance from our yardNortheast of the yard, close enough that the 2008 tornado track is a few minutes’ drive from our gate
• Main routesUS 34 east from the interchange and north into town
• Typical deliverySame or next day

Getting a truck to you

Windsor is a straight run northeast of the yard, and we get there on US 34 and up, or on Colorado 257, or across on the county grid when the highways are backed up around the interchanges. The town is a mix of approaches. In the older blocks near Walnut Street the drives are narrow, the trees are mature and the overhead is the thing that costs a delivery — a hoist needs better than twenty feet of clear air to stand a box up off the rails, and an older service drop across the apron will stop us where a tight turn would not. In the newer subdivisions the geometry is easy and the problems are different: fresh sod, an irrigation main under the strip beside the drive, and streets that have not taken their final asphalt lift yet and mark under a loaded truck. A 20-yard container wants roughly sixty feet of straight approach and about eleven feet of working width. We put boards down under the wheels as a matter of course on a new drive, and we would rather hear about a soft spot on the phone than find it with an axle. On the wind: this is chinook country, Weld publishes a 115 mph basic residential wind speed, and an open box full of felt, wrap and insulation redistributes itself across the neighborhood if it is not tarped. Tell us the surface, the grade and the overhead when you call (970) 427-0341.

Routes we run: US 34 east from the interchange and north into town, Colorado 257 for the run up the Weld side, Colorado 392 across the top of town, the I-25 frontage roads and east on the county road grid, the Larimer county roads west of town when the highways are busy.

Landmarks and neighborhoods we work around

Permits, streets and placement in Windsor

Start with the question that decides everything else: which government are you standing in. Around here that is harder than it sounds, because five of the municipalities we run to straddle a county line — Johnstown, Windsor, Berthoud, Erie and Longmont. One town government, two county governments underneath it. Windsor is a home rule town lying in Weld County and Larimer County at once, and the line runs through it much the way it runs through Johnstown a few miles south. Two addresses a mile apart can answer to two building departments, two road departments and two right-of-way desks, and the street address is the only thing that settles it. That is why we ask for one before we quote anything that touches a permit. It is not a hedge; in this market it is the single most useful thing anybody can tell you.

Inside the town limits the town is the government that matters. It runs the permit counter, it owns the streets — I-25 belongs to CDOT, and so does every US and state route through this market, whichever municipality they pass through — and any rule it has written about containers is its rule rather than the county’s. Underneath that sits a distinction Colorado takes seriously. A home rule municipality draws its powers from its own charter under Article XX of the Colorado Constitution and can legislate in local matters beyond what state statute prescribes; a statutory town works from state statute. Windsor is a home rule town. In practice the home rule places are the ones most likely to have written their own hauler licensing, their own container ordinances and their own right-of-way permits, which is exactly why the permits content on this site is written town by town rather than county-wide.

Step outside the town limits and the county becomes the road authority and the building department, and here that means naming which one before you dial. On the Weld side that is Weld County Public Works on (970) 400-4000. On the Larimer side it is Larimer County Engineering on (970) 498-5709. Building code needs the same treatment, because Colorado has no statewide residential building code — every jurisdiction adopts separately and on its own timetable. Weld County’s 2024 package takes effect 15 June 2026 and Larimer County’s 1 January 2026. Give us the address and we will tell you which owner you are dealing with before we load a truck, because on a straddle town a town name is not enough to go on.

Now the part most of our competitors skip. Start with the line that is safe everywhere: on private property — a driveway, a yard, a parking lot — no right-of-way permit is in play at all. None, from the town or from either county. That covers the overwhelming majority of what we set in Windsor. What can still apply on private ground is a town ordinance about containers, a homeowners association covenant, a landlord’s consent and the fire code — and of those, the fire code is the one with a number in it.

It is the street case that needs a phone call, and in a straddle town it needs the right one. A few miles up the corridor, Johnstown has written its rule down: Johnstown Municipal Code § 7-35 provides that “no person shall place, store or maintain a dumpster on any public property unless expressly authorized in writing by the Town,” and placement in violation “is considered a nuisance.” That is Johnstown’s ordinance and it stops at Johnstown’s town line. It tells you nothing whatever about Windsor. We could not verify whether Windsor licenses haulers, requires a container or right-of-way permit, or has a dumpster ordinance of its own, and we are not going to assume Johnstown’s rules travel. Ask Windsor directly on 970-674-2400. Start at windsorgov.com. “We could not find one” is not the same sentence as “there is none,” and we would rather hand you the right phone number than a confident guess. If the job is outside the town limits, the county is the desk instead: on the Weld side that is Weld County Public Works on (970) 400-4000, and on the Larimer side Larimer County Engineering on (970) 498-5709. An honest caveat on each. Weld County’s right-of-way material covers occupation of and construction within county rights-of-way in broad language but does not name dumpsters or containers, so the fair reading is that a call is warranted rather than that a permit is certainly required; and Larimer County’s published permit material does not address containers at all, in either direction — we give you the number and claim nothing about what it covers. Whether or not permission is involved, call Colorado 811 before anything is dug, trenched, driven or pulled.

The driveway carries one rule of its own and it is a fire rule. There is no statewide fire code doing this job in Colorado, so the edition depends on who adopted it, and the one we can name is the 2024 International Fire Code as adopted by the Town of Johnstown. In that edition § 304.3.5 keeps dumpsters and containers of 1.5 cubic yards or more out of buildings and at least five feet from combustible walls, openings and combustible roof eave lines, with no exception; the adjacent § 304.3.4 applies the same five feet from 1.0 cubic yard, with an exception where the container itself is noncombustible. Both sections exist and neither one is “the” threshold, which is where most of the copy on the internet goes wrong — along with a “ten feet from the building” rule of thumb that is nobody’s code at all. It does not matter here anyway: every roll-off we run is many times over both figures, so the answer never changes. Five feet, always, and it is measured from the eave line, not just from the wall. On a Windsor lot with a deep eave and a narrow side yard that is a real measurement, and we take it before the rails come off the truck. And note where you take that question out here. Weld County enforces no fire code at all — its ordinance says the International Fire Code shall apply only when adopted by a local fire district and shall not be enforced under the county’s Building Code — so on unincorporated Weld ground the fire protection district is the authority, not the county, and district lines do not follow town lines. Front Range Fire Rescue takes placement questions for Johnstown and Milliken on 970-587-4464.

Last, the approach. To swing a box off the rails we want about 60 feet of straight, roughly 11 feet of working width and 20-plus feet of clear overhead. What fails that test in Windsor is rarely the highway; it is almost always the last hundred feet. This is flat, irrigated high plains rather than mountain country — our own ground out at Kelim sits at 4,938 feet — so a truck here runs a section-line grid and a four-lane interstate instead of switchbacks, and the things that go wrong are different ones. In the newer subdivisions it is fresh sod, a shallow irrigation line beside the drive and a street still on base course without its final asphalt lift. On acreage it is a quarter mile of gravel lane that carries a pickup all year and ruts badly under a loaded truck in a spring thaw. In the older grids it is a low service drop and a mature shade tree over the only flat spot — a gap that looks wide open at eye level can be closed at twenty feet. Walk it, look up, and tell us what you see.

Two more layers reach every job we run, and neither of them starts at a local counter. The first is what may lawfully go in the box. Solid waste in this state is CDPHE’s, under the solid waste regulations at 6 CCR 1007-2, and the structure is not the one people bring with them from the Southeast. A Colorado landfill is authorized by a Certificate of Designation issued by the county under C.R.S. § 30-20-102, with state review — a county instrument, and one that attaches to disposal facilities rather than to haulers. Beyond the statutory bans, what a landfill will take is set facility by facility in its own approved operating plan rather than by a statewide list, which is exactly why we ask what is going in the box before we quote a job instead of after.

The bans themselves are shorter than newcomers expect and they run the opposite way from the Southeast. Colorado has no yard-waste landfill ban. The landfills serving this area accept yard waste and brush, and A-1 Organics composts green material on 970-454-3492 if you would rather route it that way. What is banned outright is electronics, kept out of every Colorado landfill since 1 July 2013 under C.R.S. § 25-17-303 — no televisions, monitors or computers in the container. Waste tires are refused at the gate by the local operators, and state rules require registration to transport ten or more, so tires never go in our boxes. Paint, solvents, fuel, automotive fluids, batteries, propane cylinders and pool chemicals stay out as well; those are a household hazardous waste run, not a container load.

Asbestos is the hard stop. We do not accept asbestos in our containers. In Colorado it is an air quality matter rather than a solid waste one, which surprises people: the CDPHE Air Pollution Control Division runs it under Regulation 8, Part B. In a single-family home the trigger is 32 square feet or 50 linear feet — far tighter than the federal commercial numbers — notification runs ten working days, the permit fee is published at $60 to $180, and a demolition requires notification regardless of size. The asbestos line is 720-507-5136. None of that is our filing to make, but all of it sits ahead of the container and we would rather book around it than deliver into a stop-work order.

The other date is 1978, which puts a job under the federal Renovation, Repair and Painting rule — and here Colorado is the opposite of most states people move from. Colorado is not authorized by EPA to run the RRP program, so a firm working on pre-1978 housing certifies with EPA directly rather than with a state agency. How often that bites depends on where you are standing: in Johnstown, only about one home in ten predates 1980 and the median year built is 2007, so RRP is concentrated in the old core rather than spread across the market. Then, before anything is dug, trenched, driven or pulled, call Colorado 811 on 811 or 800-922-1987. The statute is C.R.S. Title 9, Article 1.5, and the notice period is two business days, not counting the day of notice. Be aware that Colorado 811’s own homepage says three business days while the statute and the site’s interior pages say two — give yourself the longer of the two and you are safe either way. White-line the dig area first. Setting a box on a driveway does not trigger the call; your project does — footings, fence posts, a stump, a sewer lateral. Our permit and placement guide walks the whole sequence in order.

The ground under Windsor decides most of the rest, and almost every instinct carried in from a wetter market is wrong here. This is irrigated high plains: our own ground at Kelim sits at 4,938 feet, and precipitation across this market runs about 15.34 inches a year on the 1991–2020 normals at Greeley — roughly a third of what the Southeast gets. We are not going to tell you what the soil does underneath, because we did not establish it for this ground and it is not the sort of thing to guess at in print. What we will tell you is how the surface behaves under a truck, because that is what we deal with. A loaded 20 yard box is several tons carried on four small contact points. Dry, this ground takes it. Wet — after an irrigation set, a cloudburst or a spring thaw — it ruts, and a quarter mile of lane that carries a pickup all year will not carry us. So the driveway is the surface and the lawn is not, plywood or timber mats go under every wheel and under both rails on every placement, all year round, and after a wet stretch we would rather move a date than tear up two hundred feet of drive.

The houses match the climate rather than the map. Basements are ordinary here, which changes a cleanout more than it changes a price: stairs mean hand-carrying, and a smaller box parked close to the walkout beats a bigger one parked out of the way. Both counties publish a 30-inch frost line, so footings, water services and sewer laterals sit at least that deep, and a trench that would be shallow somewhere warmer is a real excavation here. Spoil is the densest material that comes off a residential site, which is why a footing repair or a sewer lateral is a 10 yard loaded low conversation rather than a 20 yard one. The season starts later than newcomers plan for as well: the average last spring frost is around 12 May. One adjacent question comes up often enough while a house is open to be worth answering, and we will answer it the way EPA does rather than by naming a number off a map that gave us two different readings: “Homes with elevated levels of radon have been found in all three zones. All homes should be tested, regardless of zone designation.”

The vintage of the housing is the part that surprises people who know this corridor only from the interstate, and it cuts the work in two. In Johnstown, whose mailing address our yard uses, the median year built is 2007 and 71.8 percent of the housing went up in 2000 or later; only about one home in ten predates 1980, concentrated in the old Parish Avenue and Main Street core from the sugar and dairy era, where pre-1978 lead paint and older asbestos are live questions. Everywhere else the jobs are new-build cleanup, first remodels and hail roofs. The growth behind that is real and it is fast: Johnstown went from 17,303 people at the 2020 census to 22,433 by the 2025 estimate, a 29.5 percent gain that put it tenth in the nation for growth among places of 20,000 or more in 2024–25, with 528 single-family permits in 2025. Weld County as a whole went from 328,981 to 378,426 over the same five years. Those are Census numbers, and they are why new-construction cleanup is a steady service line here rather than an afterthought.

Then the weather, and here there is one hazard that matters more than all the others put together. Hail is the anchor job. This corridor takes seven to nine hail days a year and is the most hail-prone stretch of the United States. Roof tear-off is what this market buys containers for, and it does not arrive evenly — it arrives in bursts, in the week after a storm, when every roofer in the corridor calls on the same morning. If you have just been hit, call early; that is the honest advice. Wind is the second one. Chinook downslope windstorms come off the mountains hard enough that Front Range gusts have been recorded as high as 137 mph, and the design wind speed in Weld County is 115 mph. An empty container is a sail and a loose tarp is a kite, so we weight what we cover and we would rather set a box against a windbreak than out in the open. Weld County has more recorded tornadoes than any other county in the United States. The 2008 Windsor tornado destroyed 78 homes, and its track runs about five and a half miles from our yard. People here still measure storms against it, and they are right to. Watches and warnings for both counties come from NWS Denver/Boulder on 303-494-3210. An open container left uncovered through a heavy storm fills with water and grit, and that is weight you pay us to haul. Tarp it, or ask us for one.

Where all of it ends up is the local detail we like best, because the lawful routes out of a Windsor project close one at a time and none of them close because we say so. Neither county collects residential waste, so there is no county truck to compare us with. A municipal cart, where a town provides one, is a cart on a schedule and is not built for shingles, drywall, cabinets, tile, concrete or framing lumber. Electronics may not go to a Colorado landfill at all. Tires are refused at the gate. And beyond the statutory bans, each landfill’s own approved operating plan decides the rest. The one place the Southeast’s habits genuinely do not transfer is green waste: Colorado has no yard-waste landfill ban, so clean woody debris has more than one lawful route here — the landfills take it, and A-1 Organics composts it on 970-454-3492. Keep it in a load of its own and you keep that choice. Everything else rides to a permitted facility in one of our boxes, which is the argument for a container stated by somebody other than us.

What Windsor does about household collection — whether it runs a program, contracts one out, licenses haulers or leaves it to the market — we did not verify, and we are not going to describe it from memory. Ask Windsor directly on 970-674-2400. Start at windsorgov.com. What we can tell you is that Johnstown, up the corridor, provides collection by contract under § 7-61(a), billed with the water bill under § 7-65(a) and not extended to multifamily buildings of three units or more or to commercial customers — which is Johnstown’s arrangement and nobody else’s. What is constant right across this market is the part that matters to us: no residential cart program anywhere here is built for construction and demolition debris. Shingles, drywall, cabinets, tile, concrete and framing lumber are ours to handle whichever side of a line the house sits on, and a cart is not a kitchen tear-out, a basement or a roof.

Underneath the town sits the county layer, and in a straddle town it is two layers rather than one. Neither Weld nor Larimer County collects residential waste anywhere in either county. What exists instead is drop-off: Weld County runs two household hazardous waste facilities — 1311 North 17th Avenue in Greeley and 5500 Highway 52 in Dacono — free to Weld County residents, capped at 200 pounds a visit, on (970) 400-2217, plus a seasonal one-ton landfill voucher, one per Weld address; Larimer County runs the Central Diversion & Transfer Station at 2388 W. Trilby Road in Fort Collins, on 970-498-5772. Here is the catch that trips Windsor households up: a household on the Larimer side is not a Weld County resident and cannot use the Weld facilities free or take the Weld voucher. Same town, two answers, and the address is what decides. Neither of those is a curbside service and neither of them takes job debris. That is the whole argument for a container out here, and it is not our argument — it is the governments’ own description of what they do and do not do. See the Colorado disposal and recycling rules for the rest of it.

Sizes we deliver to Windsor