Selling or keeping your copper stash? - Page 2

I load mine up and take it in every week. I'm a plumber so I get more copper and brass than anything. I haul my water heaters in every Saturday and I take the copper and brass along for the ride. I've got enough junk laying around I don't need anymore.

Well the way I see it is that with China and India as the two fastest world's growing economies, they wanna be number one but they're infrastructure is lagging behind, when I say infrastructure I mean, POWER LINES, all kinds of uses for copper and aluminum (which, by the way they are the top 2 buyers of YOURS and MINE copper and aluminum. Now those two countries haven't done us any big favors ....ever, so if we were to sit on our growing stashes and let them pay for it eventually, WE could see prices of $4.00 + per/lb. I have already been paid $3.75 per/lb. for a 200 pound load.
And as I sit here stripping out this beautiful No.1 wire and an almost equal amount of bright shiny large , braided, BBC which we all know gets the top dollar, I don't mind accumulating a large load for the yard. I shine up the occasional tarnished piece, and think of how this place I am scoring all this at still has a thousand pounds left at least. So, yeah I am sitting pretty for now, it beats collecting screen doors and window frames, and old aluminum siding, but what the hell, even that will go up, maybe not as much, but they still buy our aluminum too.
Happy hunting to all fellow scrappers, and if you have any questions, please feel free to email me, or ask me a question in the forum
Mike M

Well I'm keeping my stash until I finish stripping and cleaning the load I have now. Last weekend an eletrician called me up to clean off his 16' trailer of stuff after cleaning up his shop.. TONS of copper brass and aluminum I'm sorting through all this week.

I don't recommend anyone sitting on it, UNLESS you just happen to don't need the cash flow.
If you are using it to fund your business, you are losing money by letting your "inventory" sit.
In retail, it is called "turns", and simply put, it is the times your turn over your inventory per month/year.
You aren't making any money on something that is just "sitting there". Put it into cash and invest it into another load.

My father-in-law and myself just took his stash of copper he's been saving. he's an electrician. we got a little over $2,400 for a 826 lbs

Did he strip the wire before he took it in? I am stripping every last piece just to squeeze every cent out of it, all different thicknesses. Of course the stuff I like the best is the cable inside the big 2" conduit, take it down, get the sawzall out and chop it into manageable size pieces, pull the cable through, and now I have 100' or so of Narragansett Navawire #4 600 volt THW machine wire, and it is gonna be heavy.:-)
I cut a piece about a foot long and took my trusty utility knife skinned one side, and peeled the rest off.clean.gonna take a while with all the other wire I have to strip, but it beats just about any other kind of work.
RCA congrats on your $$$

I have been saving mine for a couple months now, i am going to sell in late june. My dad works for waste management and has the key to the landfill so once a week i can go in and get what ever copper i find. I am jealous of my dad though because he could walk away with 100 pounds a day if he really wanted to.

Im hoarding, for now.

I have a 50 gallon drum about half full of non-stripped wire. Mainly from washing machines/dryers/dishwashers/tv's. I'm guessing around 60 pounds. NOTHING crazy, not as much as yall have haha. Clean, probably 15 pounds. Again, nothing worth bringing in yet.

I'm hoarding aluminum as well. My other 55 gallon barrel is full of that.

i bring mine back whenever i have enough steel or another type of metal to atleast make $100. sometimes ive only brought back 5 pounds, and sometimes ive brought back 100 pounds..

My dad has a crazy amount. many 55 gallon barells overlowing of copper and cans, im super jealous. One of the barells is full of pipes taller than 6 feet another full of wires and the firepit has wires all around it. He has such a great job

Found this quote last night about copper prices...."No consensus exists on specific numbers, but many forecasters, including the financial firm Goldman Sachs, say demand could rise fast enough to take the price to $5 a pound sometime between 2011 and 2013, compared with a range of $4.29 to $4.40 during the past week."
Lets keep our fingers crossed for $5.00 a pound, were not far off here in Pa.