Exercise Equipment Removal in Chicopee, MA

Exercise equipment is the job where the item is not especially large but is astonishingly heavy and lives at the bottom of a staircase. That combination is what makes it a two person job rather than a favor you ask a friend for.

A motorised treadmill runs 200 to 300 pounds, most of it concentrated in the motor housing at one end, so the weight is not balanced. An elliptical is lighter but long and awkward. A multi station home gym is the worst of the group, because the weight stack alone can be 200 pounds and the frame does not come apart without tools.

Almost all of it ends up in a basement or a spare room upstairs, because that is where people put a home gym. Getting a treadmill down a flight of stairs when it was carried in by two delivery drivers years ago is the whole job.

Most of it comes apart, and that is the answer

A treadmill folds and the deck detaches. A home gym breaks into a frame, a weight stack and cables. A rack of dumbbells is just many trips. Disassembly usually costs $30 to $100 and it is almost always cheaper than the alternative, which is trying to maneuver a fully assembled machine around a stairwell turn and damaging a wall.

Free weights are their own problem

Cast iron plates and dumbbells are dense, which means a small pile is a large weight. Twenty plates does not look like much but can be six hundred pounds, and a truck has a legal weight limit it hits long before it fills up. Haulers price dense material differently for that reason, so say if there is a rack of plates rather than just a machine.

The upside is that cast iron is clean scrap. Massachusetts has banned metals from disposal since 1 July 2006, so plates and dumbbells go straight to a scrap yard rather than a transfer station. That is one of the few parts of a junk job that has genuine recovered value.

A machine with electronics is mixed. The frame and weight stack are scrap steel, the motor has copper in it, and the console is a small electronic item. A hauler splits it rather than sending the whole thing one way.

Before you pay to remove it

Working equipment in decent condition is worth trying to give away first. Local gyms, schools, and community centers sometimes take machines, and there is a real second hand market. It is not always worth the hassle, and a dead treadmill has no market at all, but if it works it is worth one phone call before it becomes a $150 haul.