I told a user I'd look into this and make some observations on tearing down a single computer, of the lowest I would expect to find (small, all low-quality, no more than scrap value items, etc)
This could help get some ideas on buying prices.....
| Category |
amount |
price/lb |
total |
notes |
| whole PC |
18.94 |
$0.25 |
$4.74 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| hdd board |
0.045 |
$11.50 |
$0.52 |
|
| hdd w/o board |
1.29 |
$0.20 |
$0.26 |
|
| ICW |
0.725 |
$0.36 |
$0.26 |
local place all wires |
| CD board |
0.065 |
$4.10 |
$0.27 |
|
| fingercard |
0.085 |
$4.25 |
$0.36 |
|
| ram |
0.06 |
$18.75 |
$1.13 |
|
| PSU no wire |
2.77 |
$0.17 |
$0.47 |
|
| floppy drive whole |
0.625 |
$0.07 |
$0.04 |
dont take floppys apart |
| CD no board |
1.31 |
$0.07 |
$0.09 |
mix in with whole floppys for same price as whole floppys at local yard. I checked with them they said its OK |
| alum |
0.5 |
$0.21 |
$0.11 |
local yard |
| small socket mobo |
1.115 |
$1.90 |
$2.12 |
|
| CPU no pins metal top |
0.04 |
$4.75 |
$0.19 |
|
| Shred/light iron |
10.31 |
$0.03 |
$0.31 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Time to tear down |
6 mins |
|
|
|
| total when torn down |
|
|
$6.12 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Difference between whole/torn down |
$1.38 |
|
|
|
| hourly rate for tearing down (diff of selling whole * number you can do in an hour @ 6mins per) |
$13.80 |
|
|
So, those are all the numbers. All these numbers are before shipping (for parts that get shipped) and before gas/travel time to the yards (for all stuff that goes local).
Some observations:
It looks like tearing down gets you at minimum, $13/hr more than just selling whole.
I pay $3/PC tower. In the example above, meant to cover the "lowest denominator", It would only be a profit $3.12 about. And that is THE LOWEST profit I could get from a complete tower. Many towers are larger, have more ram, more finger cards, MTSV parts, etc.
So, in a typical example, lets say I get 10 of these same "lowest denominator" computers. I pay $30 (plus gas to pickup and come back which I am ignoring for now). It takes 1hr to take apart.
Profit would be ($6.12*10)-30= $31.2 for 1hr of work taking apart, or (
4.74*10)-30=$17.40 profit for 0 amount of time taking apart.
This ignores travel time, gas, expenses, shipping cost etc. BUT, its a bit more profitable that I had expected assuming I did the math right.
This also means, that, IF I wanted to, I could pay an employee $10/hr to take apart (assuming he could do 10 computers and hour like I can) and still profit $21.20/hr. So that could be an option if I ever had enough to try and scale up.
However, with scaling comes added expense so that may not work out great, but just an observation.
In summary, tl;dr
it is profitable, and worth it, in my opinion, to take apart PCs rather than sell whole
a buy price of $3/tower SHOULD leave around 50% profit margin before expenses. Traveling far to pick up just one computer would ruin this though, gotta do in bulk, or calulate out a distance/number of computers formula.
you could pay someone to take stuff apart, but it would be real real thin margins and probably not worth it/doable in the US
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