Salvage Value of Electric Motor

What's wrong with contacting local metal salvage operators?

Around here the going rate for salvage motors is about 1-2 dollars a HP.

But you can get far more than that if you separate the windings from the core first.

Enamelled copper wire goes as #2 copper and can be worth anywhere from about $1 to as much as $5 a pound.

The iron cores are dense and higher quality metals they can bring premium price as well. I have gotten $200 a ton for them before when prepared scrap was $150 a ton. But lately prepared scrap is about $40 a ton so I would expect the motor core iron would be around $50 a ton.

Salvage value is not a realistic number to factor in to a motors life. Its very dynamic and changes near daily. What was worth a fortune last month is worthless today. But 6 month from now it may be worth a lot again!

Assume the lowest price and hope for more when the time comes.

One other problem is many motor manufactures are using aluminum windings and not copper. It can completely ruin the salvage value of an item when you find out that what was calculated to be 50 pounds of copper windings valued at $4 a pound ends up being 10 pounds of aluminum valued at $ .50 a pound.

I learned that the hard way and so has many salvage businesses. I have a friend that owns a big salvage company. He bought several semi loads of industrial welders and motors that were supposed to be all copper wound. Now he has several semi loads of welders and motors stacked in piles that are not worth the time and cost to process them let alone ever break even on the deal.

I have several welders I too got took on for the same reason. They are copper clad aluminum wound. At first inspection simply scraping the enamel off of the windings does in fact make them appear to be copper wound. But when the windings are fully cut it obvious they are not copper but aluminum with a thin layer of copper over them. A copper aluminum mix is worth less than half what clean aluminum is.

I have found this in a few larger motors as well! Both the welders and the motors my friend and I have are in fact big name brand American made units! And we both ave been told of many others finding this out the hard way too!

Copper and Aluminum are dissimilar metals.

These two metals in contact with each other produces corrosion.

remove stator unbolt coils and weight them.

Clean scrap gets really good prices.