How copper prices set the floor under used electrical equipment

Plate 01

Where the copper is

In switchgear it is the main and vertical bus, the breaker contacts and current-carrying parts, and the control wiring. In transformers it is the windings, though many transformers use aluminum windings and the difference is significant enough to change the price by a factor of two or three.

In busway it is the bus bars themselves. In MCCs it is the horizontal and vertical bus plus the starters and their contactors. In cable it is obvious, and cable is the purest recovery play on any list: a known conductor size and length converts to a known copper weight with very little estimation.

Plate 02

Aluminum is not worthless, and it is not copper

Aluminum bus and aluminum-wound transformers are common, particularly in equipment from periods when copper was expensive. Aluminum has real recovery value at a fraction of copper's, so identifying conductor material is one of the first questions on any inquiry.

You can usually tell from the nameplate on a transformer, and visually on bus and cable. When it is ambiguous, it is worth resolving before an offer is written, because guessing wrong in either direction damages the transaction.

Plate 03

How commodity moves reach your offer

Copper trades on public markets and the price moves daily. Scrap prices track those markets at a discount that varies with grade, processing requirements and regional demand. When copper runs up, offers on recovery-value equipment rise; when it falls, they fall.

This is why offers on scrap-value scopes carry expiration dates. A number built on a copper price from six weeks ago is not a number anybody can honor, and a buyer who pretends otherwise is either padding the discount or planning to renegotiate on the dock.

Plate 04

Recovery value versus reuse value, one more time

The reason this matters is that sellers frequently reject a recovery-value offer believing resale value is available when it is not, and hold equipment for months while it deteriorates further. The opposite also happens: equipment with genuine resale value gets sold at scrap price to a scrap dealer who never looked at the nameplate.

The way to avoid both mistakes is to have the equipment identified before it is priced, and to ask any buyer to state explicitly which basis their offer uses.