How to dumpster dive? - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / beginners

author: 44kgk1lkf6u
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: November 30, 2024, 03:16:33 am
content: Someone please explain how dumpster diving works. For example, does one need to search every dumpster in the city after work, or does one just come across things? People on Youtube find so many things. I just read on this forum about a find. Yet no one I know managed to find a single thing from a dumpster that is worth talking about.

author: indeterminate
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: November 30, 2024, 03:43:09 am
content: It depends witch country you are inIn many places around the world it is illegal to throw electrical/electronic goods into a rubbish bin.

author: 44kgk1lkf6u
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: November 30, 2024, 03:52:48 am
content: I live in America. People throw away electronics anyway regardless of rules. But they are always mundane things like hair dryers. People from American Youtube channels that I regularly visit somehow manage to find things like RF amplifiers and optical network analyzers.

author: seedkey
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: November 30, 2024, 05:10:14 am
content: Don't believe everything you see. Some great finds are for making sure channel gets lots of views

author: Konkedout
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: November 30, 2024, 06:00:33 am
content: One recent poster got a beautiful piece of equipment via what he originally termed "dumpster diving". But in fact it was a wrong piece of equipment ordered for which the receiving company had no use. The poster knew someone in the company who asked him if he was interested in this thing... No real dumpster involved.When I lived in Minnesota USA many years ago, I built a couple of recumbent bicycles. (I hacksawed and brazed the frames.) We had (in addition to garbage collection) junk collection every week or two. I drove around looking for junk bicycles which people were discarding. I used those for portions of the frame as well as some other components. Again...no real dumpster involved."Dumpster diving" is a figure of speech. I guess it is accurate sometimes but maybe less than half the time??

author: jerryk
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: November 30, 2024, 06:13:24 am
content: I think the term "dumpster find" is more of a metaphor meaning that whatever they found was heading to a trash bin of sorts. If you are looking for this type of stuff you can either be just plain lucky or put out feelers in places that may have the propensity to dispose of this type of stuff. Some examples of how I "dive" is in the near future I'm heading over to our local landfill disposals "hazardous materials" section looking for dead Dewalt lithium batteries to rebuild. I periodically run an add in our local Craigslist Aviation section looking for defective Aircraft LiFePo4 batteries to rebuild. I also introduced myself to a couple of battery distributors in our local area and said I would be glad to take any broken stuff they had heading to the "dumpster". This last method turned out to be a gold mine of endless projects from chargers, power inverters, and the entire line of NOCO stuff that, like all electronics, sometimes just fails. I have since become friends with the owner of one of these distributors and have been able to repay him through repair work on his project. All of this has added to the flavor of this great hobby.Good luck and happy "diving" (figuratively speaking).JerryEdit to add: Looks like @Kondedout covered quite adequately some of this while I was writing.

author: wilfred
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 30, 2024, 06:47:02 am
content: Quote from: 44kgk1lkf6u on November 30, 2024, 03:52:48 amI imagine that sort of stuff is more widely available in America. But don't knock mundane things, if you can fix it and use it or parts of it then grab it. People in Australia are just the same.

author: I wanted a rude username
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: November 30, 2024, 05:53:11 pm
content: For literal dumpster diving, the most important thing is to find a juicy source, like a business park (Dave's model) or shopping centre. You don't want to be wading through random residential dumpsters full of food waste and plasma screens.There's an amusing book about this (self-?)published about 10 to 15 years ago ... guy writes about his experience shoplifting and dumpster diving shopping centres in various parts of the US ... the shopping centre dumpsters would often have returned products and were a goldmine for him until the shopping centres started putting in trash compactors (sorry I can't find the name of the book). I would expect office parks in the US are still good for this ... and the more high-tech the business, the better.

author: Haenk
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 30, 2024, 06:27:58 pm
content: In the 70s/80s (even going back to the 50s) there were scheduled "large item collections" in every town, like once or twice a year.That was a great time to find all sorts of stuff, there were literally piles of old stuff in front of each house - that was the time before ebay - people cleared out old furniture, TV/Hifi, sometimes from pre-war left in the attic or stored away by the grandparents. As there were no city recycling centers, that was pretty much the only way to get rid of this.Long gone are the times; unfortunately, it is not allowed to take away stuff from the electronic waste containers (as the town is earning money with this type of waste). Needless to say, I sometimes nick a smaller item

author: Gregg
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 30, 2024, 08:52:53 pm
content: When I worked in data centers, most of the time the dumpsters were behind locked gates. The mess left by divers was the main cause for locking up the dumpsters. The really juicy stuff was only available to employees and internal dumpster diving was frowned upon. Occasionally a trusted outsider was allowed to dive. Cardboard was a big reason to allow an outside party to collect stuff because of the sheer volume going into the dumpster was reduced.At one site I remember a middle aged couple with a beat up truck were allowed to take the cardboard and basically anything they could find in the dumpster; the rule was that they had to leave the dumpster enclosure neater than they found it. Employees soon were stacking cardboard outside the dumpster to enable the recycling; a true win-win.It used to be that copper wire was saved and the proceeds went to the employee party fund until the company decided that copper was a precious metal and should be credited back to the company with the usual corporate overhead of rules that took more employee time than it was worth. So the wire just was thrown into the dumpster and anybody’s guess where it went after that; no more free pizza days for the break room.

author: 44kgk1lkf6u
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: December 01, 2024, 12:56:43 am
content: Quote from: seedkey on November 30, 2024, 05:10:14 amI see. One guy said that he tended to find Keysight stuff whenever he did their give aways. This must be why.

author: Psi
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 01, 2024, 01:45:48 am
content: It's mostly about doing your research and knowing what dumpsters to look in and at what time good things are likely to be thrown out.For example when it's getting closer to the end of the tax year companies are more likely to be buying new equipment, so are more likely to be throwing out the old stuff.And usually the business doesn't want you looking in their dumpster so some careful planning is involved.

author: golden_labels
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 01, 2024, 02:41:55 am
content: There are also some reasons not yet listed above, that make organizations less likely to leave valuable equipment in dumpster for anybody to fetch. Less likely compared to the past. Namely: records, bookkeeping, taxes.Records. Unlike you, who may freely decide about your own stuff, the management in organizations controls property owned by somebody/something else. That property can’t just disappear. There must be a record, that shows to whom and in what circumstances the property was passed. If a waste management company picks up the equipment in bulk, the entire process is very simple and streamlined. The same can’t be said about a random person obtaining the items.Bookkeeping. In finances the same thing may be a loss or not depending on the context. Already deprecated(1)equipment, that is officially marked as waste and passed to a waste company, is not a loss. It’s already worth $0 or less. But the same equipment, if not marked as waste but considered potentially useful to anybody, has a positive value. If it leaves the organisation without producing sufficient profit, it’s a loss. All praise the books.Taxes. Marking unneeded items as waste, getting some single entity to pick them up, and getting a stamp on protocols makes taxes trivial. Not doing so puts the organization at risk of messing up taxes.Of course all this may be dealt with (depending on your location). But that requires effort. I hope you may see how avoiding that effort leads to discarded equipment basically being piped to some external company.(1)In accounting sense.

author: Psi
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 01, 2024, 02:51:03 am
content: Yeah, it's sad that often working and useful equipment gets destroyed because the company feels they have no other easy/convenient and legal option. And sometimes just out of spite to stop others getting any use out of it. *Cough* Apple *Cough*.It's one thing I would change if I had the power to do so.

author: Doctorandus_P
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 01, 2024, 10:38:45 am
content: It's not much use to go though ever dumpster you find. Municipal waste would be mostly empty packaging, dirty diapers and such, while dumpster diving in industrial locations would get you more (broken) industrial stuff. Dumpster diving around office buildings would get you discarded office equipment (as Dave has shown in many of his video's).Dave also did a few videos about a big containers full off discarded lab equipment, but such are rare and hard to find. He usually gets a tip of when and where that happened for the video's he made.

author: mikeselectricstuff
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 01, 2024, 11:52:35 am
content: As said earlier it depends a lot on where you are. IN UK/EU, WEEE regs mean it costs businesses money to dispose of electrical junk, and if you get on good terms with smaller companies they can be happy to let you scavenge their "Weee-bin"Larger companies are probably more worried about liability etc.Copper and to a lesser extent aluminium scrap has value, so were there is a lot of this, dumpsters are treated as being full of valuable assets that they will get money from, and locked up.In my experience the best situation is something like a refurb/demolition in a commercial or industrial property - the people in charge are the ones doing the building work, have no clue about what is being dumped, and are more than happy to let you clear costly space in their waste containers.I don't actively search, but never walk past a roadside dumpster ( we call them "skips" here in UK) without taking a look.Very locally I've found a small office phone exchange unit, a dental camera, and video printer used at a dental practice - all fully working & flipped on ebay.Definitely business/commercial/industrial - rare to find anything decent in a residential area, except consumer electronics someone can't be botheerd to fix.

author: themadhippy
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 01, 2024, 01:08:35 pm
content: Quoteits technically illegal to take stuff from a skip, no good asking the person who threw it in the skip as it no longer belongs to them,its the property of the skip owner.QuoteThere also concerned about getting sued when the bit of kit they've chucked away injures you and you try and sue said company,this was the mentality of 2 previous employers,brought to them by there caring insurance companys.

author: mikeselectricstuff
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 01, 2024, 04:28:02 pm
content: Quote from: themadhippy on December 01, 2024, 01:08:35 pmThat would depend on the terms of the contract the hirer has with the skip company.In the case of a 1-off skip hire, the hirer is paying for the use of the container, and the removal/disposal on collection day. What happens before that is none of the skip company's business.Both parties will usually be more than happy for some space to be cleared as they are paying for the disposal.Terms and conditions from a random skip company, no mention of ownership of contents:https://www.skiphireuk.co.uk/terms-conditions/May be different for things like council collections, or containers provided for scrap recovery etc., but it would still need to be explicitly stated in the contract that the contents belong to the waste company.

author: CaptDon
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 01, 2024, 07:05:30 pm
content: Most 'big' companies are required by the original equipment manufacturers to destroy 'obsolete' equipment or at least trade or return said gear back to the O.E.M. for refurbishment or destruction. Tektronix was doing this. Their old gear was built so well that it had a nearly infinite life with proper care. So the 'lower cost' market was flooded with top notch used gear which kept getting handed down. This killed the part of the marketplace for lower cost new gear and was considered detrimental. Theft is so prominent that it is hard to keep an employee from saying "This R&S analyzer is obsolete so I would like to take it home". Even though it was only one year old and cost over $40K. The guy at the gate doesn't know or understand what is going out the gate so the company says "Nothing goes out the gate unless crushed or destroyed, and then only to approved scrappers". Big companies are finally learning that their surplus test gear has value and used equipment purchasers are knocking on the doors. Great lab managers will make some gear available to their lab employees for sign-out use at home. This is a great thing for ham radio hobbyists and so forth. It also speaks well of the employees interest in experimenting and continuing education, even if self taught!! We had a super cool lab manager who stacked up all the seldom needed gear that was taking up too much lab space and simply said "Take what you want, I removed it from out lab inventory as damaged or lost". I gave a TEK TDS420 to a guy here on EEVBLOG and I aquired a repairable TDS644B!!

author: golden_labels
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 01, 2024, 09:18:27 pm
content: Quote from: themadhippy on December 01, 2024, 01:08:35 pmIs this the case in UK?I’m asking, because a similar problem existed in Poland for a long time. An item was always somebody’s property, even if in a dumpster. That was the case for so long, I never realized the law has changed. Now you may consider an item to not be anybody’s property and become the new owner, if the circumstances indicate an owner abandoned the item(1)(doesn’t apply to bees). Perhaps something similar did happen in UK.(1)For those in Poland interested in the subject: Art. 180 and 181 KC.

author: themadhippy
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 01, 2024, 09:44:49 pm
content: Quotenothing to do with the contract between hirer and skip company,its how you interpret the theft act 1968

author: G0HZU
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 01, 2024, 10:08:50 pm
content: QuoteI haven't heard that one before. That definitely doesn't apply where I work and I've done rather well out of the dumpster/skip at work over the years. I've salvaged a few nice bits of broken (BER) Tek gear here that Tek quoted ridiculous amounts to repair. Think in terms of an initial quote cost of up to £15k just for Tek look at the faulty item. I think Tek do this if you don't have a current service contract with them. So I was allowed to have the faulty Tek gear for free. Tek definitely didn't demand to have it returned to them and it was no use to the company I work for.Keysight are fairly similar. They often quote about £10k as an initial estimate to repair something like a spectrum or network analyser. They don't demand to keep it either. They just attach a sticker saying "return unrepaired" and then they send it back to the company I work for and the company writes it off as BER.

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 01, 2024, 11:01:30 pm
content: Quote from: Haenk on November 30, 2024, 06:27:58 pmThis practice (called "bulky trash pickup") was still going on in the 2000s in Berkeley in the San Francisco Bay Area; I'd go up and down streets on those days and pick up all kinds of useful stuff.It has since been discontinued; more's the pity.

author: mikeselectricstuff
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 02, 2024, 12:25:21 am
content: Quote from: themadhippy on December 01, 2024, 09:44:49 pmIt surely hinges on when transfer of ownership occurs - is it when something is put in the skip, or when it s removed by the skip company? Is there any case law on this?The hirer is hiring a container and a disposal service - hard to see how it could be interpreted that that anything put in the containerprior to removabecomes the skip company's property unless their terms state that.

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 02, 2024, 12:42:39 am
content: Quote from: mikeselectricstuff on December 02, 2024, 12:25:21 amVery difficult for me to be the least bit sympathetic to a trash hauler's proprietary interest in their, well, trash:it's not as if they (most of them, from what I know) give much of a shit for the stuff they pick up.Into the "landfill" it goes, unless someone spots a particularly valuable itemandthey're able to segregate it from the ... trash before they hit the transfer station.Unless it's a company that actually recovers stuff, like 1-800-GOT-JUNK.

author: CaptDon
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 02, 2024, 02:15:47 am
content: A portion of the 'must be destroyed or returned' was to protect intellectual property, both of the O.E.M. and the user. Yes, those insane repair quotes from Tek and others are totally designed to sell new gear. B.T.W., we had looked at some Tek oscilloscope gear reaching the $250,000 dollar price tag but they did offer a 'trade up' which included some of our broken Tek gear which cost around $100,000 new. I used to love Tek gear but I hate them with a passion these days. Equipment that is easily killed and impossible to repair at any reasonable cost. I wonder if Tucker still exists? They were a used equipment retailer at nearly new prices. I used to look at their rental/purchase equipment catalog and just laugh. 4 or 5 months of rental and you could have bought it used somewhere else. We all have equipment horror stories to share working for companies like Genital Electric, My Bee Em and others. G.E. actually made money by destroying equipment purchased for one job then scrapped because they bought the gear retail and charged the customer list price as part of the project development costs or N.R.E. 'non-recoverable expenditures', then bought the same stuff again for the next project.

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 02, 2024, 02:24:42 am
content: ... and don't even let's get started on stuff bought on military contracts ...

author: Alex Eisenhut
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 02, 2024, 03:02:09 am
content: Finding out about thrift stores in your area would probably be more productive. And cleaner.I've found a Heathkit vacuum tube oscilloscope, a 12V 7A power supply, Cisco firewall, stuff like that, visiting Value Villages and Goodwills.Various pieces of antiquated, but amusing to me, audio gear. Obsolete drives like Zip, Jaz, Syquest.Check out CRD's channel and his trips to thrift stores.https://youtu.be/s4HAqGrJFCU?list=PLec1d3OBbZ8K3YriSoI-QfzsqP1aGxBaa

author: G0HZU
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 03, 2024, 08:31:29 pm
content: Quote from: CaptDon on December 02, 2024, 02:15:47 amMaybe this only applies in the USA? The last piece of BER Tek gear I salvaged (for free) was one of these:https://www.testunlimited.com/Product/Tektronix/RSA6114A/3935It has all the top HW and SW options fitted including 110MHz real time BW and enhanced DPX and 1Gb memory plus lots of demod options and the preamp. Tek didn't want to help with the repair and they definitely didn't want to have it disposed of or returned to them.Here's an old youtube video of it looking a the Wifi activity at my house across a 100MHz real time bandwidth. It turned out to have a MMIC failure on one of the LO paths. As you can see, it is now working again

author: Ranayna
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 04, 2024, 08:20:21 am
content: Quote from: Haenk on November 30, 2024, 06:27:58 pmThese trash days went far into the 90s, maybe even 2000s in my area. I scored many devices to dismantle when i was a kid on these trash collection days. I was always miffed to see all the TVs: They were just too large to carry away with my bicycleBut these went away i think mainly because they attracted, for lack of a better word, organized scavengers, especially in later years. Everything even slightly valueable was collected by scrap collectors ruffling through everything, and leaving a mess. Originally relatively neatly organized piles looked like a bomb exploded during the night.

author: themadhippy
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 04, 2024, 12:40:04 pm
content: Quoteyou borrow your dads wheelbarrow.

author: wilfred
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 04, 2024, 12:45:23 pm
content: Quote from: Ranayna on December 04, 2024, 08:20:21 amAnd now they're too large for an ordinary car.

author: Calaverasgrande
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: January 15, 2025, 10:55:52 pm
content: I've been dumpster diving for a very long time. Since at least the 80s.I grew up prety poor in an ecnomically stagnant part of the US. So early on I developed a distaste for wastefulness. But also this sense of finding hidden treasures that you could only acquire in the pre-internet days.Over the years I've found some wild stuff. Lots of musical instruments. A Xerox copier printer tossed out by the school district because they changed vendors. An HP Laserjet. No model # just Laserjet. Hundreds of 16mm film reels. Furniture, food, consumer electronics.Recently scored an early flat panel TV with old school Svideo, component and composite inputs. Great for my new video synthesis hobby since most of those modules work with composite or component.Also scored a Roomba that just needed a new roller.The trick is to always be on the look out. Whenever I see an open top dumpster in front of a house being renovated I check it. The first thing that happens when someone buys a house to flip and remodel is that they remove all the stuff the previous inhabitant left. Which can include cool stuff that the laborers don't care about. Also keep an eye out for open top dumpsters outside of businesses for the same reason. I've scored a ton of computer equipment that way. At one point I had about 6 pre-Intel Macintoshes set up in a little LAN with a SCSI disk tower attached to an old IIFX as a file server. All of it scavenged except the disks. Most folks manage to yank their hard disks when they toss stuff for security. But not always.Vacuum tubes. Whenver I see an old organ, CRT TV or similar device dumped somewhere I'll crack it open to pilfer for tubes. It really helps to have a Leatherman multi-tool.You have to be careful. A lot of the best dumpsters are on private property. In some localities they have nuisance laws meant to discourage scrap metal recyclers from going through garbage and leaving a mess. I hate those guys too because they will chop an attached cable off a perfectly good device.You also may run into folks who claim a dumpster as theirs. Not because it's their property, but because they want to claim all the contents.There was a bakery that had a dumpster often filled with messed up pastries. I witnessed a fight over the contents break out between a family of 5 and some homeless guys. The result was that they put a locked gate around the dumpster, so nobody gets trash pastries now!

author: special_K
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: January 15, 2025, 11:13:22 pm
content: Around places I live I found over a few years:Pioneer hi-fi separates systemsolid state black and white tv, working but with plug cut off1980s solid state colour tv, "working" but in terrible condition, not interested in restoring it1990s sony trinitron, rescued it from being smashed by kids, needed lots of case repairs but working wellearly Pentium HP Vectra computer1968 Raleigh Sports, junk condition but provided tons of useful spare partsvarious 1990s bikes1970s Duel record player, just needed new beltCommodore 1084 monitorPS4, fully working just clogged hard with dustVestel made 50 inch HDTV, infamous backlight psu failure, left it therevarious radiosmy deskfour wooden chairsscrap timberI'm sure there is more I forgot. Like Calaverasgrande I just always have my eyes open, but I never go out with the intent to find stuff. I just don't ignore it if I happen across it.One key difference is if I saw a CRT TV old enough to have Valves I wouldn't crack it open to get them, I'd take the entire TV. A vintage TV is incredibly difficult to find in the UK now, under any circumstances.