Deciding To Live On A Budget

Scrap copper is a common part of any scrap buyer's business, but to get the best value for your scrap it's a good idea to make sure it's properly prepared for sale. Properly cleaned, stripped or sorted copper will save the scrap yard time and labor prior to smelting or re-sale, which means they often pay a little more per ounce to give the public an incentive to do the work for them. If you're already planning on making a trip to a scrap metal buyer with a bundle of copper, taking the time to prepare it will ensure that the trip is worth your time.

Clean and Strip

The most common form that most people find copper in is insulated wire, but the insulation adds a considerable amount of extra weight to a load. When dealing with insulated copper wire of any kind, strip away as much of the rubberized coating as you can. The scrap yard or their buyer will have to go through this anyway, so it's worth several cents extra per pound if you can do it for them.

Apart from copper wire, copper pipe should also be pre-cleaned before you bring it in to a scrap buyer. You can heat the tubing to the point that any solder melts away, and scrub residue off with a wire brush. Use a coarse wire pipe cleaner to scour away any lingering mineral deposits on the inside of the pipe as well, both to increase its value and ensure the scrap yard doesn't deduct from your total.

Pre-Sorted

While not all scrap yards differentiate between grades or types of copper, those that do prefer copper which has been sorted into its various types, grades and forms. The easiest place to start is sorting by size, which will give you a good idea of the other differences between each form that copper comes in.  Each type of copper may be alloyed with a number of different other metals, with bright copper found in wiring usually containing the highest total percentage of pure copper.

Unsorted copper will often be purchased for the lowest grade's price, so it's in your best interest to pre-sort your copper and have it weighed separately. This can be a bit time consuming, but pure copper tends to be as much as a dollar or more a pound more than lower grade copper wire, depending on the market.

Check out scrap buyers in your area and find out how close to the current spot price they're buying copper at. Ask about incentive pricing for stripped and cleaned copper, and take the time to prepare your copper for sale. In the end, you'll walk away with notably more money in your pocket, and the scrap yard will have less work to do before they can make a profit from the transaction. For more information, talk to a company like Sackin Metals.