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Do you charge for disposal of older PCs?

VirtualLarry

VirtualLarry

No Lifer
Just curious.

I've had a few clients and would-be clients "threaten" to leave older junker / non-working PCs with me. "Because I know that you fix PCs and maybe you could fix this one up and give it to someone."

Granted, I do sometimes do that with PCs. I found someone had thrown out an older Celeron PC with 256MB RAM and a CD-ROM or maybe RW drive. I added a 512MB stick of RAM I had lying around, re-formatted it, and gave it to someone to be a "Kids computer".

Thankfully, there is a local electronics recycler near here. But I'm thinking I should charge people at least $20 to drop off their old "fixer-upper" PCs with me, just to cover my gas + time to drop it off at the recycler, if I can't fix it up.

I would, of course, waive that fee, were they to purchase a replacement PC through me.
 
VirtualLarry said:
Just curious.

I've had a few clients and would-be clients "threaten" to leave older junker / non-working PCs with me. "Because I know that you fix PCs and maybe you could fix this one up and give it to someone."

Granted, I do sometimes do that with PCs. I found someone had thrown out an older Celeron PC with 256MB RAM and a CD-ROM or maybe RW drive. I added a 512MB stick of RAM I had lying around, re-formatted it, and gave it to someone to be a "Kids computer".

Thankfully, there is a local electronics recycler near here. But I'm thinking I should charge people at least $20 to drop off their old "fixer-upper" PCs with me, just to cover my gas + time to drop it off at the recycler, if I can't fix it up.

I would, of course, waive that fee, were they to purchase a replacement PC through me.
Click to expand...

I think your viewpoint is completely reasonable. If you have space you could wait until you have around 5-10 of them before making the trip to cut down on costs.
Time is money and you are not in business to provide service for free.
You won't make money that way.
 
You should definitely charge a fee. If they don't like it, they can haul it to the recycler themselves. However, in my area the reyclers and scrap dealers will actually come to my shop to pick it up if I have enough stuff for them to make it worth their while. Also the scrap dealers will pay you to allow them to take your ewaste away so they can harvest the metal. You won't get as much money as reselling it yourself, but sometimes it gets to a point that you don't have the time to part out or repair the computer.

Also, you can offer to destructively format your customer's data for a fee. Though be careful, sometimes they'll decide to keep the hard drive rather than have you destructively format it.
 
Tell them to wait for the next technology turn-in event. We have one about every year or so. Usually by the time someone wants to get rid of their stuff it is so old it is not worth it. Although I have used the same old DVD drive in 3 builds. It is nice to have a way to install software.
 
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