WE BUY SURPLUS ELECTRICAL WIRE IN LENEXA

Tenant improvements keep the reel shelf full

A warehouse fit-out is mostly branch circuitry and lighting, which means quantities of #12 and #10 MC cable bought in 250 foot coils and consumed unevenly. The last coil of a job is often unopened. The second-to-last is usually two-thirds full.

Office and lab suites add another layer: dedicated circuits, receptacle runs in furniture feeds, and a riser to the floor panel. Small-gauge single conductor accumulates the same way, box by box.

• MC and AC cable, #12 and #10, in coils and on small reels.
• THHN and THWN-2 singles in 500 and 1000 foot spools, partly drawn.
• Unopened boxes of building wire from a cancelled phase.
• SER and SEU left from panel and service relocations.

Cold storage, freezers and the heavy feeders behind them

Refrigerated space is the part of the corridor that uses large conductor. Freezer rooms and ammonia machine rooms carry heavy feeders, and equipment connections take flexible cable that gets replaced rather than reused when a unit is swapped.

That work leaves a distinct mix on the shelf: 4/0 and 500 MCM copper, tray cable in the larger sizes, and SOOW whips cut to length. Cold-room cable is worth a careful look, because the jacket tells you how it was treated.

• Feeder copper from 1/0 through 500 MCM, often still on the mill reel.
• SOOW and portable cord, 10 to 2 AWG, in cut lengths and full coils.
• Tray cable and VFD cable from motor replacement work.
• Bare copper grounding conductor from equipment bonding.

Data rooms, risers and the low-voltage layer

Every building in the corridor has a telecom room, and every telecom room gets re-cabled on a schedule that has nothing to do with the electrical contract. Boxes of plenum-rated cable come out of those jobs half used, and the leftovers are usually still sealed.

Fire alarm, access control and camera runs add their own cable, in 1000 foot boxes that rarely empty. Low-voltage work of this kind is priced the same way data center and utility rooms are handled elsewhere: on class and on footage, so the box label matters more than the coil.

Keep the electrical and the low-voltage apart when you photograph them. They are priced on different evidence, and a single pile shot makes both harder to read.

• Plenum and riser-rated communication cable, Cat 5e, Cat 6 and Cat 6A.
• Fire-alarm cable, shielded and unshielded, in part-used boxes.
• Access control and camera cable, siamese and composite.
• Fiber patch and riser cable left from a rack refresh.

What has to be true before a reel is priced

Wire is priced on class, conductor material, size and the length actually remaining. Three of those four are printed on the tag. The fourth is the one people guess at, and it is the one that decides the offer.

A tape measure laid across the coil, with the reel diameter visible in the same photograph, is enough to estimate footage within a workable margin. That is a better basis than a stated length that turns out to be the original put-up.