How to get rid of a refrigerator in Miami

The short answer

That is the complete price: two people, out of the kitchen or the garage, down from any floor, loaded, disposed of. No refrigerant fee, no stair charge, no walk-up fee, no same-day surcharge. Minimum visit $75.

Before the crew arrives

Five minutes of preparation saves the whole visit.

• Empty it, including the freezer. A loaded refrigerator is far heavier and food will end up on your floor on the first tilt. If there is meat in there, bag it separately — in this heat you do not want it opening on the way out.
• Defrost it if you can. A freezer with an inch of ice in it is heavy and it drips the whole route. Overnight with the door open and a towel underneath is enough.
• Disconnect the water line to the ice maker and dispenser, and shut the valve. This is the single most common cause of a small flood on removal day.
• Unplug it a few hours early so it is not at working temperature when it moves.
• Tape the doors shut, or better, tell us and the crew will. An unrestrained French door swinging open in a corridor takes paint off a wall.

Do not remove the doors and leave the cabinet standing open in the house. If a fridge is going to sit for any length of time where a child could reach it, take the doors off entirely.

The hurricane-season refrigerator

A large share of refrigerator removals in this county trace back to one week of the year.

Extended power outages after a storm are a normal Miami experience, and a refrigerator is not designed to sit at ambient temperature for four days in August with a full freezer inside it. Even after the power comes back and the unit runs again, the smell is often permanent: it gets into the liner, the door seals and the insulation behind them, and cleaning does not reach it. That is the fridge that quietly moves to the garage, then sits unplugged for two years, then gets called in.

Two practical notes. First, if a storm has just passed, deal with the food before you deal with the appliance — an unopened fridge that stayed shut is a different problem from one that was opened daily. Second, everyone in the metro reaches this conclusion in the same two weeks, so collection capacity across the county is stretched. The appliance that has already been dead for a year should not be the one you are booking in the week after a storm.

The second fridge in the garage

A Florida institution and a quietly expensive one.

There are no basements here, so the garage is the overflow space, and the overflow appliance lives in it: the old kitchen unit kept for drinks and party ice, or a chest freezer bought before one storm that has run empty ever since. Both are sitting in an unconditioned space where the ambient temperature outside the cabinet is regularly over ninety degrees, which means the compressor works far harder than it would indoors and the unit costs more to run than most owners realize.

They also rust from the bottom up on a concrete slab in a humid garage, and near the water the cabinet corrodes from the outside in.

A standard fridge is $164 and a chest freezer $146. Clearing both in the same visit as the rest of the garage — $164 + $146 = $310 for the pair — is the usual pattern, and it is normally combined with a truck-fill price for everything else in there.

Built-ins, galley kitchens and service elevators

The high-rise version is a different job.

Built-in and integrated refrigerators in Brickell, Edgewater, Coral Gables and along Collins are $238, and they are heavier than a freestanding unit, cabinet-framed, and normally installed before the surrounding joinery was finished. Getting one out means unfastening it from the surround and walking it through a galley kitchen that was not designed for it to leave.

Then the building takes over. Everything goes through the service elevator on a booked window — often weekdays only, often a fixed block — and the association will want a certificate of insurance naming it on file before a crew is allowed past the desk. Some buildings require the loading dock reserved separately from the lift.

Sequence it: ask management for the window and the certificate requirements, get the certificate issued a few days ahead, then book the pickup inside the window. The price is unaffected by the floor.

Should you donate or sell it instead?

Only if it works, and be honest about the test.

A working, reasonably modern refrigerator has a market here, particularly in the rental-heavy parts of the county, and charities that handle appliances will sometimes take one. What they will not take: anything that does not cool, anything with a smell, anything with rust through the cabinet, and generally anything beyond a certain age.

A fridge that sat warm through a multi-day outage falls at the smell test almost every time, no matter how well it runs now. So does one that has spent a couple of years unplugged in a garage with the doors closed.

If you are trying to sell one out of a high-rise, factor in that most buildings will not let a private buyer move an appliance out without a booked window and an insurance certificate. That is usually the point at which a private sale stops being worth the effort.

Recycling, refrigerant and what it does not cost you

Refrigerators contain refrigerant and insulating foam that have to be handled properly at end of life, and the steel cabinet has scrap value. That is all handled at the receiving end.

What matters to you is that none of it appears on your bill. There is no refrigerant recovery fee, no appliance surcharge, no environmental line added afterwards. A standard refrigerator is $164 and that is the number you were quoted before anyone was dispatched.

Your utility may run an appliance recycling incentive from time to time, usually for working units it collects itself. Worth a look if your fridge still runs. If it does not, it is not eligible for that kind of program anywhere.

Booking it

Send a photograph of the unit in place and say whether it is freestanding, built-in, a mini fridge or a freezer, plus what floor it is on and whether there is a lift.

If anything else is going in the same visit — a washer at $133, a dryer at $128, a stove at $134 — list it and you get one total before the day. If you are in a building, send the certificate requirements and the window you were given. Bookings and crews work in Spanish across the county.

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