How to get rid of a TV in Columbus

The short answer

Visit minimum is $75, so a single TV is a $75 visit. A TV with the stand it sat on is $68 + $96 = $164, which clears the floor comfortably.

Recycling is inside the price. There is no screen fee, no CRT surcharge and no environmental levy added on the day.

Why a TV is not ordinary trash

Screens carry materials that do not belong in a landfill. Older cathode-ray tube sets contain a significant amount of leaded glass. Flat panels of a certain era have mercury in the backlight. Everything has circuit boards.

Because of that, electronics are handled through their own stream almost everywhere, and you should assume a television is not an ordinary tree-lawn item in Columbus. Check the city's refuse collection page for your address rather than guessing, and look at what the county solid waste authority currently arranges for electronics, because those arrangements change.

Several national retailers take small electronics in store, usually with limits on size and quantity that a 55-inch panel does not meet.

The three televisions people call about

The broken flat panel. Cracked screen, dead backlight, or simply replaced. Light, easy, and the reason people call is usually that it is not clear where to take it. $62 to $73 depending on size.

The basement tube set. A CRT from the nineties, in a Clintonville or Whitehall finished basement, weighing more than the sofa beside it. Two people got it down there and it has not moved since.

The rear-projection cabinet. The big one. A late-nineties or early-2000s projection television in a wooden cabinet, in a Reynoldsburg or Northland family room. These are enormous, front-heavy and structurally awkward, and they are the single most common reason somebody books a TV removal in this city rather than handling it themselves.

All three are priced by screen size on the same list, and all three are carried up whatever stairs you have at no extra charge.

Wall mounts and what is behind them

If the TV is on a wall bracket, take it off the bracket before the day or tell us in the notes. We can lift a panel off a mount, but we do not do drywall repair, and in a century home the bracket is very often screwed into plaster and lath rather than modern studs.

That matters in the older Columbus neighborhoods. Pulling a heavy mount out of hundred-year-old plaster takes a fist-sized chunk of wall with it. If the house is going on the market, get the patch done properly before the listing photos rather than discovering it the week of.

Also: if the room is going to be repainted anyway, this is the moment to pull the mount, not after.

Wipe it first

A smart TV is a computer. Before it leaves the house, factory reset it. It is holding your wifi credentials and your logins for every streaming service you ever signed into on it, and a reset takes two minutes in the settings menu.

Nobody does this. Everybody should, and it applies equally to a set you are selling, donating or throwing away.

Selling or donating it

Worth a try if the panel is under a few years old and works. The mid-August campus turnover in the University District is the one window when a working television genuinely moves free in a day, because a few thousand people are furnishing houses in the same two weeks.

Not worth a try: anything with a cracked screen, any CRT, and any rear-projection cabinet. There is no secondhand market for those in central Ohio or anywhere else, charities will not take them, and listing one for a month only delays the inevitable by a month.

Give a working set four days on a free listing. After that, book it.

The January pattern

Columbus has a predictable television-disposal season and it is the first three weeks of January. A new set arrives before the holidays, the old one goes into the basement or the garage for now, and the garage is already full from winter, so by mid-January the car is outside and somebody wants the TV gone.

Book it with whatever else is in the way. A TV at $68, the stand it sat on at $96 and a box of electronics at $77 is $68 + $96 + $77 = $241. If the basement or the garage is genuinely full behind it, compare against the truck ladder: a quarter load is $241 and a half is $431.

What happens to it

Televisions come off the truck at the electronics stream rather than going into a landfill load with the furniture. That is what the flat price pays for, along with two people and the carry.

Same rates across Franklin County and the surrounding suburbs, and same-day is often available. Which matters mainly in the specific case that brings people here: a new television being delivered tomorrow and nowhere to put the old one.

Frequently asked questions