What Size Moving Truck to Rent
It is always best to do your move in only one truck trip if that is at all possible. You can pick a rental truck that can be up to 28 feet long and can hold up to 7 rooms of furniture in one trip. So truck size selection depends upon the amount of stuff that you want to move during each trip.
The bigger the truck, the better when it comes to required capacity because the greater the capacity of the truck, the more easily it can be loaded since you won’t have to pack the truck full to the brim. But it’s harder to drive a big 22-28 foot truck compared to driving a 10-18 foot truck, so easier driving can also be a consideration when selecting a rent-a-truck, especially for those who don’t have much truck driving experience.
The following is a chart of truck sizes that we recommend for various amounts of household goods…
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1 room only = 14′
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2 rooms = 16′ to 18′
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3 rooms = 18′ to 20′
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4 rooms = 22′
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5 rooms = 24′ to 26′
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6 rooms = 26′ to 28′
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7 rooms = 28′
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more rooms = another truck
When you go to truck rental facilities, you will find that many of them recommend a smaller truck for each of these sized loads than we have done here. These sizes will give you some extra wiggle room to fit everything on the truck on moving day.
Moving Truck with a Ramp or with a Liftgate
At first glance, liftgate trucks appear to make the moving job easier, but in reality, they don’t. Liftgates are designed for moving just 1 or a few big things up onto the truck. During household goods moving, many, many trips are required in and out of the truck so the engine has to be kept running in order to keep the battery charged because liftgates work off of the battery. Just 2 or 3 lifts will exhaust its charge and immobilize the truck. Leaving the truck running is fuel-inefficient and gases the crew out.
Besides, it’s much faster to carry or dolly furnishings up/down a ramp than to stack things on the lift and wait while it to goes up or down. Also, things on the lift can slide off of it because most lifts are not flat but have a bit of a slope to them. So, you usually need at least 2 to 3 people around it as things are moved up/down on it. This is very slow and
