My friends think I’m poor and weird, but I regularly (daily) check my neighborhood electronics bin, and today was one my lucky days.
Here’s what I found:
The Bose Companion Speaker 2 Mk. II had a broken adapter. It showed 0V AC and DC when plugged in, and I was slightly concerned that it was a 12V AC adapter, but I found another 12V DC wall wart and it worked without a hitch. Beautiful sound, looks almost new, although it did have some white noise, notorious for this model.
The second score is a Belkin N750 dual band N Wifi router. I’m not exactly sure why someone tossed this unit, but it also works without a hitch and retails for ~$90. This is my first 5GHz unit, and both my laptop and Nexus 4 support it, so I’m very happy with this unit. There wasn’t DD-WRT for this one yet, so I flashed it to one of the compatible Asus firmwares, which looks much better.
About half of my electronics are dumpster dive scores, many of which I sell for pocket change after testing and cleaning. Some of my notable scores are a Sony HiFi unit, a record player with a musical record in it, 500W Seasonic PSU, and a bunch of speakers.
Do you guys go dumpster diving too? Please share your scavenger collections!
My Brother In Law is a Police officer and when he worked nights he would need a truck to bring home all the good large items he found and he was very good at his job
He always had lots of prepaid cell phones from drug busts.
Another buddies brother worked for the Town on the garbage truck and one time he went to the house and asked if the guy wanted to throw out a push mower that looked very new and the guy said it was junk.
He took it home and it started on the first pull and cost $300 new.
Dumpsters are not what they used to be years ago, or I could be getting older.
LOL! That's quite a haul; I've never found anything that nice! I haven't gotten to dumpster dive since my college days. I would alwasy make a trip around campus at the end of the spring semester because the students would be cleaning out their dorms and throwing EVERYTHING away. I got a leather jacket, some decent clothes; I could have had furniture if I needed it...
Most useful find was an expensive set of drafting tools that someone had thrown away. As it turns out, I was taking the same course that required me to purchase the exact same set of tools at the campus bookstore the very next semester, so I saved big there!
Great scores. I haven’t had anything for a while actually, but I have had computers. I have also taken those towel rail radiators out of skips and sold them, people love those things. Last summer I pulled a Bianchi push bike out of a skip, that was a pretty good find.
I did recently find one of the oil-filled radiator space heaters on the scrap trailer at my local dump... Replaced the defective GFCI plug on the unit, then reset the internal overheat protection breaker and replaced a couple of the terminal lugs connecting to the coils. Works great now! Quiet, with no moving parts, and helps kill the chill in the living room when it's not cold enough to start a fire...
not a dumpster find but my sis in law won a box of new pots/pans , pic frames, house stuff, ect at an auction. She took few a items she wanted and gave use the rest. I thought more crap we dont need but there was a new stethoscope in the lot, I did some investigating on it and found out it’s not made anymore but a very popular one. I put it on ebay and it sold for $500.00………………we never told sis in law.
thought they had banned dumpster diving. maybe not. idk i’m in georgia. but about 3 years ago i found an alienware laptop all it needed was a new battery.
Thanks for sharing your scores as well, I’m very jelly too.
Not sure if dumpster diving is banned here, but the I seem to amuse the guards whenever I go through the dumpster, so they’re pretty cool with me, haha.
When I sold on E-bay I used to hit local theather dumpsters for posters. I’d regularly score 2-3 dozen at a whack, most were never used. Most only brought $5 but some blockbusters like LOTR, Titanic etc. brought $50+ each. Now the chains never discard posters, even the torn/dirty ones, all are sent back to the distributors [at least around here].
Interesting thread! LOL
We have a recycle area at work, and have gotten quite a few servers, tons of hard drives, RAID arrays, etc. SSD’s, and drives up to 3TB that show good SMART data. Have built a 30TB array, with server all from scrounged parts. Hardly ever use the stuff, but is too good to toss out - should start selling some of it. Have my eye on a small tv with dvd player that seems to work for the garage.
Neighborhood electronics bins should be more common.
Jaidmaster, If you recall, how many hours for Power-On Time do you usually see for all these drives? Any good 2.5inch drives? Best time to sell them off would have been while HDD prices were inflated from the Thailand floods.
They are typically used to test our systems, code development, etc. Some have had times around a year or so - but not sure what the average is. Some 2.5” drives, got a chassis (24 drives) full of 120GB, and 6 or so 160GB ssd… Mostly 3.5”, mixture of sas and sata. 500GB, 750GB, 1TB, 2TB and 3TB.
The RAID controllers are the hardest to come by, but have about 6 or so working…
A Logitech MK550 wireless keyboard and mouse (battery in the keyboard had died and the owner apparently tossed the whole thing!)
Several pairs of cheap computer speakers (Labtec, Harmon Kardon)
A number of cameras and webcams. Mostly junk but their CCDs might come in useful for a project.
Lots of video processing boards and a couple DSP boards. I’m keeping these guys mostly to harvest components.
Lots of laptop power supplies. These are great for LED lighting projects.
About 5 Targus security cables. Combinations were unknown so it took a few days to brute force the combinations.
“The Art of Computer Programming” by Knuth (someone actually threw these away!)
Not dumpster diving, I worked maintenance at a trash burning facility. Found a few things. A Diamondback BMX with messed up rims and handlebars, but a nice straight frame. Found a brand new portable booster pack, a Gameboy Advance, several laptops that I just jacked the hard drives, processors and ram (never done anything with any of it yet)... Found about 2 dozen NDS games, but I am guessing they were shoddy bootlegs, because only two actually worked. One kid found a working GBA SP with the backlit screen. He turned it on and was like wow, it actually works... then smashed it off a wall. I was like WTF! Found several boom boxes, but they usually never worked right and we just used them for radios on the job. Found a few gold and silver rings.
Not really dumpster diving, but scored a couple of APC UPS that just needed new batteries from the local Craigslist ads in the free stuff area. Also got an old router that was dd-wrt flashable.
Once, in the 80’s, outside a teardown in a fairly affluent part of a suburban Boston town, I looked in the bin and saw a vintage MacIntosh MC-60 tube amplifier. I couldnt believe it.
Clearly the crew had no idea what it was. It needed 3 or 4 new tubes and I then traded it for an Acoustic Research AR-1 turntable, and a pair of mid-70’s Pioneer CS-710s (I think, it was a while ago) .
When I asked the guy if he had a car I could borrow to get the stuff back to my apartment, he showed me a 1972 brown Dodge Dart Swinger (two-door) and said “Give me 200 bucks and you dont have to bring the car back”
I got 10,000+ miles out of that car, for gas, oil, two tires and a water pump.
Once , in the same week, I bought a turntable and Volkswagen Bug.
