Electricians

Cable is copper wrapped in something that is not copper, and essentially every question about electrical scrap is a question about that ratio.

A drum of clean single-core and a coil of old armoured are both “cable” and they are not remotely the same item, because the recoverable copper inside them per kilo is completely different.

The grades you will actually have

• Bright, clean singles — new offcuts, no oxidisation. The best of it.
• Twin and earth — house wire. Enormous volumes of this come out of a rewire, and it is a decent grade.
• SWA / armoured — steel wire armour over the cores. Heavy, and a lot of that weight is steel, so it prices well below what the kilos suggest.
• Flex and appliance leads — thin cores, thick sheath, lower recovery.
• Data and alarm cable — Cat5/6, low recovery, but it comes out by the skip-load on a commercial strip-out and it is worth collecting rather than binning.
• Motors and alternators — copper windings in a steel case. Always worth keeping separate.
• Consumer units, boards, breakers, contactors, transformers — mixed, but transformers in particular are worth having.

Is stripping worth your time?

Sometimes, and the honest answer depends on volume and on the cable.

Stripping thick, clean singles is quick and the grade jump is real, so if you have a run of it, yes. Stripping thin flex by hand is close to pointless — the recovery is low and it takes forever. Somewhere in the middle sits twin and earth, which is worth stripping if you have a machine and generally is not if you do not.

If you are producing enough to be thinking about buying a stripper, bring a load in first and we will tell you what the difference actually came to on that load. That is a more useful number than anything on the internet.

Burning is the one thing to avoid outright. It ruins the grade, it prices as burnt, and it is deeply unpleasant to be near.

Where it came from

We ask about cable, particularly large quantities of armoured or bare copper. Same as with rail on the heavy scrap page, and for the same reason: cable theft from sites, substations and rail is a real and constant problem, and a yard that takes anything without asking is a yard that is buying stolen metal every week whether it means to or not.

For a contractor this is a protection rather than an obstacle. Records at both ends mean nobody ever has to reconstruct where a load came from from memory.

Setting it up

A tub for bright, a tub for twin and earth, a tub for everything else, and a collection when they are full. Payment by transfer, transfer note each time.