Quote Originally Posted by mikeinreco View Post
There are places buying I just feel like I get ripped off every time I sale it.....they want to give me dirty prices and low grade wire which I guess some of it is
There isn't much in the power supplies that make them worthwhile.It's a hard go with those things.Even the wire coming out of them is tinned copper so it's not worth much. It might be okay of you had cheap labor, processed them by the gaylord, and could extract every little bit of value out of the things. Maybe better to delegate that job to someone in a 3rd world country and use your time more productively ?



It's a similar problem with " computer wire ". It's almost all small gauge tinned copper. Lots of plastic, low copper recovery, and to make matters worse ... there's a fair amount of aluminum braid in it's construction as well. It would be a miserable job to run that through a granulator. Lots of waste and the output product would be heavily contaminated. Barely a #2 copper if that.

Maybe it was a learning thing for the scrap buying industry ? They used to pay better for it .... but after awhile they figured out that it was only marginally worth doing ? It's really scraping the bottom of the barrel for material if you're running a granulator ?

Around here, " computer wire " goes as low grade insulated @ .05 /lb.

Mid-grade is .40/lb. That's stuff that "plugs into the wall" . It seems to average somewhere around 30 % recovery and is seldom tinned. You can get away with mixing in the individual strands of PSU wire & individual strands of marine and automotive wire even though that stuff is usually tinned copper.

Just figured i would throw it out there as grist for the mill. It might make it easier to part with it if you don't feel like you're getting ripped off.