Advise needed

Definitely shop around for the best price. Here in Mesa Az unless you are a legitimate licensed business having a reason to deal in large quantities of copper and other frequently stolen materials the scrap yards won't buy anything that appears to be commercial scrap from homes. Tweekers steel it here like crazy. There has been recent situations where drug crazed people cut in to live transformers. I am sure you can figure out what happened next. If you have a place to store the stuff sit on it for a while to see what happens with scrap prices. The yard I sell to told me that copper prices have gone up significantly but 50 cents is not impressive. A buck higher I might consider. I always clean up copper. Cut off the solder joints and clean off some of the corrosion. Copper from walls is generally void of weather exposure. Sounds like you have a really good deal there. Don't give it away for pennies.

Originally Posted by Beamer

Hello, I'm new to this forum. Any advise would be greatly appreciated.

Long story short, I got extremely lucky and am currently pulling the plumbing out of an old medical facility that will be torn down next week. Every room has sinks, toilets, etc. The runs down all of the hallways are 2" and the drops to each room looks like about 1". Laundry rooms, showers, mechanical rooms...You get the idea. Anyway, If I did the math right, we should pull around 10,000 pounds of copper out of there. Also, there will be some brass but it doesn't look like there will be more than 300 pounds (purely a guess).

I'm not new to scrapping, but I am new to scrapping this much at one time. I'm in the refrigeration business, so I've scrapped coils and our scrap copper for years but nothing that ever amounted to this much at once. Maybe I'm naïve and this much is common...I honestly don't know.

My questions:
Will the scrap yards give a better price for a large quantity like this?

The brass...There are a bunch of pieces from the water heaters that have like 4" of 2" copper and then a brass fitting then another very short piece of copper and then brass. 5' sections that go copper/brass/copper/brass/copper/brass. Do I take the time to separate all of it? In the past, I've sold it and got a "copper/brass mix" price which I'm fine with but I've got quite a few lengths that are like the one I described. It may sound petty, but if it'll bring another 50 bucks, I'll cut it up. If not, I won't waste my time.

I've got a scrap yard that is fairly close to me (within 15 miles) and it's super easy to unload/weigh and check out. It's all indoors...Pretty nice facility. But, they usually don't pay as much as the yard that most people seem to use. That yard is a huge pain in the tail and it takes forever. Any chance the "easy to use" yard will come up on their price? I don't expect them to match the other place, but close would be nice.




Any input would be greatly appreciated. I'll most likely never get to scrap a building like this again and kind of want to make the most of it this time.