Hauling couches by bike

Couches are fun to haul by bike.

Workcycle's bakfiets, pictured above, is not particularly well-suited for the task, as the couch is much too large to fix in the box. That didn’t stop it from being fun to make it work, anyway.

The best choice for hauling couches to use a Bikes-at-Work
trailer, as seen in the photos below.

Couch weight varies greatly. The one above had lots of metal guts to allow the seats to recline, plus it was water-logged for being outside. Simple couch designs can be relatively light, with a lot of the volume being in cushions.

I try to keep my total cargo weight not much above 200, so that the handling remains safe. It will be tempting to give friends rides on couches that you might be carrying, but this most likely quickly put you over that weight limit. That’s why the experience above didn’t last much longer than it took to take the photo. On some cargo hauling trips, I have carried a bathroom scale with me to check how much things weigh, to avoid exceeding safe limits. With practice I could get a sense of how cargo weights were adding up as the trailer was being loaded.

The lowest-effort arrangement for hauling couches by bike is to pair the Bikes-at-Work trailer with electric assist. With that arrangement, I’ve been able to haul couch and loveseat pairs without strain.

While I've taken a number of couches to the dump, this last one I got out of the dump. A wealthy college student had thrown away this nearly-new condition couch along with a couple thousand dollars of almost other basically brand new furniture. Once we get this one home we found it was too big to into into the door into our basement, so I hauled it back to the Habitat ReStore as a donation for someone else to have.