AAAC conductor buyer in Plattsburgh

What a Plattsburgh AAAC lot looks like

Most of the alloy conductor that leaves this county sits in the middle of the size range: 4/0 through 636 kcmil, in 19-strand and 37-strand constructions, on wood or steel reels that have often been re-used twice already. Line stores order it by size and stranding rather than by code name, so the tag matters more than the printed legend. 266.8 kcmil in 19 strands and the 37-strand sizes above 500 kcmil are the two groups that turn up most often.

Identification is easier than with ACSR and still gets done wrong. A cut end of AAAC shows alloy strands through the whole section, with no distinct core and no step in diameter under the outer layer, which separates it from ACSR immediately. It does not separate it from AAC, which is also all-aluminum but drawn from 1350-H19 and noticeably softer, or from ACAR, which uses alloy strands over an alloy core and behaves differently again. The tag, the printed legend and the standard quoted on it settle the question.

Condition is mechanical rather than chemical. Alloy conductor does not rust, so the usual corrosion discount does not apply; what does apply is handling. AAAC is harder than EC aluminum, so a kink from a dropped reel or a poor stringing setup is more permanent, and sheave abrasion shows as scored or flattened strands that will not pass a reuse inspection. Compression fittings for AAAC are also a separate catalog item from ACSR fittings, which matters to the next buyer.

Part drums are the norm. A store that has finished a rebuild keeps two or three thousand feet on a reel because returning it is not worth the paperwork, and those part drums are the most useful thing in the lot whenever the footage is written down. Mixed pallets of jumpers, ties and short cut-offs are worth separating before anyone quotes them. Anything removed from a line is handled only after the owner's qualified personnel have de-energised it and released it; nothing is cut or loaded while it is still associated with an energised circuit.

Access, freight and the northern distance

Plattsburgh is not hard to reach; it is hard to reach cheaply. I-87 runs to the Canadian border, US-9 and NY-3 cover the lake plain, and the rail corridor along the lake still carries freight, so a trailer can get to most yards without drama. The problem is distance. It is about three hours to Albany and considerably more to the New York metropolitan area, so a single part drum cannot carry its own freight. Lots are gathered across Clinton, Franklin and Essex counties and moved together.

Local constraints are the usual northern ones. Yards are small and often unpaved, loading windows are short in winter, and a reel that has stood outside since October may be frozen to the ground in January. Say whether a forklift can reach the reel, whether the yard is plowed, and whether the reel is still banded or has been rolled off its flange and left on its side. Those two situations are different jobs with different equipment.

For anything stored near the lake or near the border, describe the exposure honestly. Conductor kept a few hundred feet from open water behaves differently from conductor in a dry store, and a buyer will look at the ends and the outer layer before anything else. Photographs of both ends, the tag and the whole reel save a wasted trip better than any written description.