Demolition cable buyers in New York

Cutting to length, or cutting to weight

There are two ways to take cable out of a building, and they produce two different products. Cutting to length means making the fewest cuts that let the cable be removed, then measuring and labelling what came out. Cutting to weight means getting it into the container as fast as possible.

The first is slower on the day and worth more per pound. A 120 ft coil of 4/0 with a legible print is a usable length that a maintenance department will buy. The same cable in six 20 ft pieces is scrap, because nobody is going to splice six pieces to save a run, and the buyer prices it as copper.

Most crews settle on a threshold: coils above a length somebody could actually use get measured and kept apart, everything below goes to the recovery pile. That threshold should be agreed with whoever is buying the material before the crew starts, because it changes how the work is done. It also needs to account for construction — a short length of medium-voltage cable is worth keeping in a way that a short length of 12 AWG is not.

What contamination does to a load

Demolition cable arrives with the building still on it: tray scale, conduit grit, paint, tar, fire debris, standing water in an open coil. Most of that is a handling nuisance, and a buyer prices it in without much discussion. A few things are different, and they stop a load rather than discount it.

• Asbestos. Older cable can carry asbestos in braided insulation, in fillers and in the flash guards of old equipment. It is not something to identify by eye on a demolition floor; where a survey flags it, the material is dealt with by a licensed abatement contractor and is not sold as cable.
• Lead sheath. Paper-insulated lead-covered cable is common in older buildings. The lead is a separate recycling stream, not a reason to refuse the cable, but it is handled as its own material rather than mixed into a copper load.
• Oil and fluid. Pipe-type and fluid-filled cable carries dielectric fluid. Anything that has held fluid is drained and handled under the owner's environmental arrangements before the cable is considered.
• Fire damage. Cable with melted or carbonised jacket has no reuse path. It is recovery material, and if it has been in a fire it is kept separate from clean coils.
• Biological and flood contamination. Cable that has stood in sewage or flood water is a handling problem before it is a cable problem, and a buyer will normally decline it rather than price it.

Why demolition cable prices on metal plus construction

There is no footage, no tag and no test history in a demolition lot. What survives is weight, and whatever the jacket print or a cut end still says. A buyer works from conductor material, size and insulation, applies the copper or aluminum content per foot for that construction, and then adds something for the fact that the construction is known rather than guessed.

Known construction raises the value because it opens uses that do not involve stripping: an industrial maintenance store, a temporary power job, a yard or farm run, a contractor who needs a length and does not care that it came out of a building. Unknown construction closes all of those doors and leaves only the metal.

Occasionally a demolition lot is worth well above its metal for a different reason: the cable was installed shortly before the building came down, and somebody can prove the date from a permit, an inspection record or the contractor who put it in. That is uncommon, and it is the one circumstance in which demolition cable is priced as near-new material.