Purchased 6 pcs from one of my bird dogs. 4 @ $5 ea, 2 @ $4 ea.
He's a fellow scrapper, thinks it's great. Used to put his PCs in with shred.
So he folds up his cash, all happy, and says, "do you really make money on these?" And I said, "well sure, all the experienced people in-the-know on ScrapMetalForum.com use the same figures...so I must be making money."
Then I scratched my head. "am I really making a profit on this?"
So I put those six computers aside as a test. Here's how it panned out. Your numbers will vary of course, based on regional pricing:
Shred 88 lbs................................$6.60
Good Motherboards 2.5 lbs..............7.87
Not as good Motherboards 4.5 lbs.....8.77
Peripheral Boards 2 lb 13 oz..............8.58
CPUs (inc. 1 486!) 6 oz...................13.69
Wire 5.5 lbs...................................5.23
#2 Copper 10 oz............................1.50
Brass 5 oz..................................... 0.52
Hard Drives Complete 9.25 lbs...........8.33
Low Grade boards 2.25 lbs................0.23
Aluminium 5.75 lbs...........................2.88
Motors 4 lbs...................................1.00
Misc floppy drives 5.5 lbs..................1.65
Gold finger cards 2.3 lbs....................9.88
Rambus 5 oz.................................2.19
Simms 2 oz....................................1.75
Gross revenue................................80.67
Costs...........................................(2 8.00)
Net profit......................................52.67
Net profit per computer....................8.77
Revenue per hour (5).......................10.53
(inc. purchase, sell, & beer run)
A couple of notes...I could break down the HDD but it is easier for me to sell them intact. Motors is mostly the transformers from the power supplies, plus any easy ones from CD drives, etc. The aluminum got most of its weight from heatsinks off the motherboards, the heatsinks from the power supplies look good but don't weigh much. The copper is mostly from breaking apart ferrite windings.
My personal take-away from this is, based on $$ for copper, motors & low grade, is that I should not break down power supplies, because that added a huge amount of time and only gained about $4 (net of what I would've sold the power supplies for intact). I think without the time spent on power supplies I'd be more in the $30/hr range.
Take it for what it's worth; your results may vary wildly.
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