Deciding whether a reel is surplus or recovery

Every surplus lot ends in one of two places. Either the cable goes back into service somewhere, or the metal comes out of it. The decision is not about age or appearance. It comes down to whether the reel can be identified, whether enough footage remains, and whether the condition would let the cable be installed and tested by whoever buys it next, which is a stricter test than whether it looks usable.

Sellers often describe a whole storehouse in one optimistic sentence and then accept a single blended price for it. Splitting the same material into a surplus stream and a recovery stream generally produces a better total, because each stream is priced on what it actually is instead of on an average of everything in the room. The sorting is the work, and the work is what gets paid for.

Identification, remaining length, damage, age and voltage class. Ask those five of every reel and the sort decides itself. Identification comes first because a reel nobody can name cannot be sold as a product, however sound the cable inside it. Length comes second, because footage decides whether the reel is worth handling at all. A hundred feet of a common size is a sale; fifteen feet of the same cable is a weight.

Damage comes third: wet ends, a torn jacket, a kink from a crush. Age matters mainly through the standards the cable was made to and the condition of the jacket, not through any shelf life. Voltage class matters because it decides which buyers can use the material and how much insulation and shielding has to be accounted for in the price. Two reels of identical size can land far apart on those answers.

You can run the test with a notebook in an afternoon. Write the five answers against each reel and the two piles appear on the page. Where an answer is genuinely unavailable, put that reel in the recovery pile and note why, which keeps the surplus list clean and defensible when somebody else reads it later. The note also tells you what to look for the next time you walk the store.

• Can it be identified from tag or print
• Is the remaining length usable
• Is the cable dry and undamaged
• Does the construction still have a market
• Which voltage class and what shielding

A reel is recovery material when the answers to the five questions run out. No tag and no legible print. A length too short to be worth paying off. Ends that have taken water. A jacket torn back to the shield. A drum crushed with the inner wraps kinked. A construction nobody specifies any longer and no buyer recognizes on sight. Any two of those together will usually settle it without further argument.

Insulated recovery material is not the same product as bare bright copper, and it is not priced as though it were. The insulation, bedding and shielding have to be separated before the metal is sold, and that cost sits between the two figures. A seller who compares a scrap quote for insulated cable to a bright copper price is comparing two different things. Look at what the material is rather than what it contains.

Keep the recovery stream honest. Putting a few sound reels into a recovery pile to lift the average does not work, because the buyer sorts it again on arrival and prices the entire load at the lower level. A clean recovery pile gets a clean recovery price, and the price is agreed before anything is loaded onto a trailer. Consistency is what makes a second load from the same plant easy to quote.

The two streams price differently because they are different products, not because one is being penalized.