Lost Any Valves Lately?

I have kinda been hit a house I have an offer in on was broken into on the weekend and the coper pipes and taps were stolen. on another point I just replaced a brass valve at my current residence that was worn and leaking with a new stainles steel one and the scrap value of the old one was 90% of the price of the new ss one so maybe it is worth changing them out yourself and paying in the 10% rather than having to pay the 100% of the new valve when they get stolen.

Hi mupwi,

Here in the UK there have been over a thousand church roofs gone missing, they are made of lead!!!

Also copper is regularily stolen from mains electricity transformers.....very risky to say the least!!!

Spencer.

we have a lot of problem here with ppl steeling the transmision cables but I have never heared bout them steeling it out of the transformers amaizing the lengths ppl will go to.

we did have an incident a couple of months ago where somone stole the ss bolts out of the base of one op the towers that hold up the lines resulting in it falling down interupting the 11kv suply to one of our majour industrial areas for about a week while they repared it meaming companys like toyota and south african brewries lost a week of production for the equivlent of about $5 of scrap

Copper pipes for air conditioning have been the problem around here. Well that and anhydrous ammonia, but that's another story.

The last time I was asked to scrap brass wire from our EDM I had to sign a sheet at the salvage yard and show ID.

It's probably far too obvious for scrap dealers to require some sort of identification, if not even ownership verification, before accepting suspicious metal. Some things would be obviously legitimate, but for someone to bring in a half-mile of power transmission line, or the innards from a commercial refrigeration plant, really ought to raise eyebrows.

We have had lots of really creative metal thieves in the Pacific Northwest. They have taken to the river, and are stripping brass, copper and steel off of boats and ships. We had a huge old paddle wheel boat, that had a complete engine room (including tools). This was completely stripped. What a shame. It has really gotten out of control.