Good Morning / AfterNoon to Everyone!
Aluminum Wire: Thankfully for us scrappers it's not as common as CU is. But alum wire is out there in almost every guage you could imagine. At this Recovery site that I am at this very moment, we collected approx 200 some odd pounds of alum wire, solid 100% alum. strand as well as solid core, and yes there is also braided alum. tri-plex (Over-Head, High Tention wire) with the single steel wire running through the middle, surrounded by clean alum. Quite often it is refered to as Service Drop within the electrical industry.
A couple years back I made a wall display showing the many different type of wires so our guys "and me" would have a better understanding how to seperate CU wire. Currently I am way out of town on a large Recovery site, however once we go back home I will take some good photo's of the display and post it on here.
We still have about another week before we finish up here, so perhaps if I have time in the next day or two I will take a few pics of the alum wire that we still have here on site and post them. Hopefully it will help my fellow scrappers out in wire knowledge & identification.
Last year I learned a hard lesson regarding alum wire. I had placed a bid on GSA.gov for (The Lot) consisting of 4- pallets of misc. wire, from the the auction pics I could clearly see that a lot of the wire on the pallets were Romex and romex type wire. We won the bid and two days later my brother and I arrived with the excitement of a little kid... approx. 1/2 of the wire was alum wire. Since then we are much more cautious when we bid online with GSA or IDOT.
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