My little brother had a garage full of copper, so we turned it into $380
My little brother is a journeyman and apparently has half his garage filled with leftover copper wire from jobs. He showed up yesterday and said, “Hey, you want to make some money?” I said say less. He had coils of wire, shorter cut pieces, and a bunch of copper wire that had been sitting in bins for who knows how long.
We spent a few hours going through everything and separating the cleaner copper from the insulated wire and pieces that would get a lower price. We used a pair of wire strippers to clean up some of the smaller pieces, then weighed everything in batches so we knew roughly what we had. By the end, we had about 80 pounds of copper wire worth taking to the scrap yard.
We loaded everything into a couple of heavy-duty bins and drove it to a local scrap metal recycling yard. They weighed the load, checked the different types of copper, and paid us around $380 total. My little brother still has more copper wire in the garage, so we're probably going to go through another batch next weekend. I didn't expect all that leftover copper wire to turn into this much money. I'm trying to save up for a commercial KitchenAid mixer, so apparently I'm willing to spend my weekends sorting through copper wire to get one.