Skip hire sizes are quoted in cubic metres, which tells you the volume of the bin but not much about the job in front of you. The practical question is simpler: how big is the pile, and what is it made of?
Start with the 2.0m3 bin. It is the smallest in the fleet and the right answer more often than people expect — a garage tidy-out, a move, a single bathroom strip-out, or a few days of household junk. It is light enough to load comfortably and small enough to sit on a driveway without dominating it.
Move up to the 3.5m3 when the rubbish is bulky rather than dense: old furniture, appliances, a kitchen reno, or a pruning job where the branches are stacked instead of bagged. Timber and green waste do not compact the way household rubbish does, so a ute load of branches that looks manageable will fill a small bin level to the rim.
The 6m3 bin is for whole-property jobs: a full house clear-out, a deck or fence demolition, a builder’s strip-out, or several kinds of waste at once. If you are combining hard fill with general rubbish, the bigger bin is also the safer one — heavy material eats into a bin’s load rating long before it looks full.
Two things help more than the arithmetic: how the truck gets to the bin, and how it gets away again. A bin on a driveway behind a parked car or under a tree canopy can cost you a delivery, so mention anything narrow, low or steep when you ask for the quote. And tell us the material before the day — hard fill, green waste and general rubbish are different loads, and we would rather size the bin correctly the first time.
Talk to the yard about your load
If the sizing is still a guess, email canterburyminiskipsnz@gmail.com with the material, the suburb and roughly how much there is. We would rather size the bin once, correctly, than have a load turned away at the gate.