Scrap wire

[eds]

At what point do you consider wire for scrap? Going thru wire in the shop yesterday and have a bunch of small coils of romex and m/c 25' and less, scrap of keep? Spools of #12 and #10 with less then 40 or 50' scrap or keep?

 

[MAC702]

It's taken me 25 years in the profession to finally be comfortable with throwing some away. My matured opinion is that if I have scraps of a certain size, and haven't actually USED them in a year, they need to go, and new ones of that size don't get stockpiled. I had to start thinking of the space and freedom from clutter as valuable in its own respect.

 

[Coppersmith]

As a business owner, every piece of wire gets evaluated for possible use as does every piece of cut conduit. It only gets scraped when the cost of carrying it around or storing it is projected to exceed the cost of buying some new. When it represents profit and loss, you are more careful with it.

When I worked for bigger companies, anything less than five feet of conduit would get tossed. I have three foot pieces in my truck.

Ten feet of #12 or #10 on the end of a spool is ten ground tails I can make. A five foot piece of 4/0 can be one conductor of a back-to-back service.

Moral: Waste not, want not.

 

[junkhound]

As a business owner, every piece of wire gets evaluated for possible use as does every piece of cut conduit. It only gets scraped when the cost of carrying it around or storing it is projected to exceed the cost of buying some new. When it represents profit and loss, you are more careful with it.

When I worked for bigger companies, anything less than five feet of conduit would get tossed. I have three foot pieces in my truck.

Ten feet of #12 or #10 on the end of a spool is ten ground tails I can make. A five foot piece of 4/0 can be one conductor of a back-to-back service.

Moral: Waste not, want not.

+1

I've not thrown away anything useable in 70+ years :lol:

OTOH, at the aerospace company, most anything with the slightest defect gets thrown away an destroyed so it cannot get back into the supply stream.

 

[readydave8]

I always tried to keep shortest scrap on truck, not shop, so to be more likely to be used.

 

[Adamjamma]

In old days used to be able to get free cable, from the cable guys and free wires from other installers... have gotten free cat 6 cable even... around eighty feet on a five hundred foot spool..lol..
wired a house once using mainly other people’s short spools..lol...

nowadays though it is harder to scrounge..accountants paying more attention...

 

[sameguy]

I wired a 3 bedroom raised ranch in "scraps " to clean out my truck one time.
I've made men pull large pipe out of the dumpster after having them "clean" the bone yard, they all were 2" and up, 10' with stub 90s, like you could never use that in a 5 story new building.
I had a guy tell me he won't use the end of a roll of thnn because it's too curly, I told him I would ask the owner if he could buy 400' rolls to get rid of the last curly 100'.
Theres profit in them there scraps!

 

[kwired]

I always tried to keep shortest scrap on truck, not shop, so to be more likely to be used.

At some point one has to decide they are not likely to ever use all those pieces, plus consider that new scraps will continue to accumulate, and then clean out the truck or the shop

 

[Besoeker3]

A somewhat related story.
Wee in UK had red, yellow, and blue for three phase and black for neutral. Sensible colours you would think. But we were forced into EU "harmonised" colours a few tears ago. Stockists in particular had to scrap lots of the old RYB - then I saw a house in France with a three phase supply and guess, what? It was wired in RYB, probably some of the stuff our stockists were obliged to discard/scrap.
Brexit is maybe not such a bad idea.....

 

[petersonra]

Brexit is maybe not such a bad idea.....

Brexit will bring winners and losers, like most political decisions. My guess is overall when it is done Britain will be better off not tied to the moribund EU and the states in it that are near bankrupt. Best to stay away from them as best you can.

 

[Coppersmith]

At some point one has to decide they are not likely to ever use all those pieces, plus consider that new scraps will continue to accumulate, and then clean out the truck or the shop

I was finishing the piping on a big job today and ran out of sticks of 3/4 EMT. All I needed to finish was a four foot piece. I searched the scrap pile in the truck and darn it I was out of 3/4" scrap as well. I had to take a trip Big Orange to get a stick of pipe. (I bought several.)

 

[Tony S]

At work I hated throwing things away. I’d decommissioned a substation and so I changed the locks, it became my squirrel store. Anything I thought could be used again would be locked away.

Commissioning a new 1850kVA 11/3.3kV Dyn11 transformer we found the manufacturers hadn’t fitted the neutral point 500/5A CT. The best I could find in my squirrel store was a 400/5A, it got the project away.

At the time accountancy took materials in stock as taxable so my store became one of the worst kept secrets, all the engineering staff knew about it, the accountants didn’t.

 

[jeff48356]

I always keep scraps of wire to use for shorter runs when I wire new construction. In fact, I only consider pieces 3' and shorter to be 'scraps', which I usually cut up into pigtails for use when making up boxes. Anything over 3' can possibly be used between nearby boxes, and I consider those to be 'remnants'. I try to use up all my remnants first before opening up new 250' rolls of cable.

 

[kwired]

I always keep scraps of wire to use for shorter runs when I wire new construction. In fact, I only consider pieces 3' and shorter to be 'scraps', which I usually cut up into pigtails for use when making up boxes. Anything over 3' can possibly be used between nearby boxes, and I consider those to be 'remnants'. I try to use up all my remnants first before opening up new 250' rolls of cable.

I take it you are mostly talking about NM cable, in particular 12 and 14 AWG cables.

Individual conductors (THHN/XHHW/ETC) one doesn't seem to use up the scraps so easily, especially larger than 14 and 12 AWG. Might keep them around but after a certain amount of time passes, one just has to go through them and majority of pieces shorter than 10, 20 even 50 feet sometimes just need to go on the pile that goes to the scrapyard, as they are likely never going to get used. I have scrap pieces in the shop that after time start to become overwhelming. The scrapyard pile(s) is out back and can be something you will not want to search through just to find a particular length of a certain size. It may have foot pieces to hundred foot pieces, some might be good, some may have insulation damage. 8 AWG and smaller pile is like a pile of spaghetti.