Industrial Transformers?

Hi all,

I own and run a demolition company that does a lot of industrial and commercial demolition. I just got a contract to remove 3 industrial transformers. I have never done anything with these. I have heard stories of some of these things having up to $30,000 in copper in them. I do know about the pcb oil and have had it drained. If anyone has any advice on the best/quickest way to dismantle them (torching, using my shear), and how to tell which units have aluminum in them and which ones are copper. 2 of them are 10,000 lbs a piece and they are that typicle grey colour. And the third is that transformer green colour, 8,000 lbs and about 8 feet tall.


any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Hello Sam, and welcome to SMF. Good luck with your transformers. There was a thread just a day or two ago that mentioned something of larger transformers. http://www.scrapmetalforum.com/day-l...-its-made.html

Not sure if there's any others specific to transformers. Try a google search using scrapmetalforum.com and keywords such as large transformer etc

I don't have any trouble distinguishing copper from aluminum windings on smaller stuff. To me, the aluminum windings just look like bloated copper windings. Not sure if it applies to much larger ones. If all else fails you can still use an old standby, take a pocket knife and slice into one

You might try running the part numbers by a transformer company like Florida Transformer, Inc Home to see if they know what the windings are made of. I know that's way down here near me but its the only one I've had any dealings with.

While I can't offer you any help on detecting which is which, or how to break down one that big...I will be the first to ask, can you post pics of the job in action? :) We love those kind of things.

Sure some folks will chime in with better help then my own, so I'll just wish you luck, an hope to see more on your up coming job.

Sirscrapalot - keeper of the traveling cooler.

The nameplate sometimes will tell you if it is an aluminum winding.

A transformer that contains $30K of copper would have to have at least 10K lbs of copper in it. I'm thinking your transformers will yield maybe 30% of their weight in copper....as a "SWAG" guess. So you might see 10K lbs of copper out of all three.

You will have to "de tank" them to pull out the internal windings--nip the row of bolts around the top with a torch and lift out the core and coils.
You will now be able to tell for sure if it is copper or aluminum windings. I've heard that some transformers can be aluminum for one winding and copper for the other, so check both the primary and secondary windings.

I'm assuming you have already checked them for resale as transformers? There is a market for large transformers--lots of big outfits take them out of service a fair length of time before they need to for reliability reasons.

Hope this helps,
Jon.