Two Completely Different Markets
A scrap yard sees a 2000A switchboard as a few hundred pounds of copper bus and steel. A replacement-market buyer sees a working asset that some plant needs to survive an outage. Those two views produce wildly different numbers — routinely 5x to 20x apart on switchgear, breakers, and MCCs.
The Replacement Market Reality
When a plant's main breaker fails at 2 AM, new-from-factory is months away. The only fix is a used identical unit, and plants pay accordingly. That urgent, inelastic demand is what funds our offers — and it exists for gear of every age, especially obsolete lines with no factory support.
What Should Never Be Scrapped
Molded case and air circuit breakers, MCC buckets, bus plugs, protective relays, padmount transformers, and complete switchgear sections should never hit the scrap pile before a photo goes to a buyer. Even oddball items — bolted pressure switches, old electromechanical relays — have collectors of a sort in the parts market.
The Five-Minute Test
Before any electrical gear goes in the scrap bin, spend five minutes: photograph it, text the photos to us, and wait for the number. Payment is upfront and we haul it ourselves, so the comparison with scrap is clean — and it is rarely close.
