Wire brief · Conductor metal and grounding
Bare copper wire: ground grid, bus and stranded conductor
Bare copper has no jacket to protect and no rating to read. What is left is the conductor itself, and the question is whether anyone wants it as wire or only as metal.
Request a quote
Tell the desk what you have in Bare copper wire
Send the basics and a buyer reviews the lot, usually the same working day.
- Reviewed by a buyer, not a scale
- Reels, pallets, partials or a full truckload
- Anywhere in Ohio, one desk
- 01Send the wire type, quantity and pickup city.
- 02A buyer reviews the lot and replies with a basis.
- 03Freight and release are agreed, then the load is booked.
Lot details
Everything helps, but the wire type, the quantity and the pickup city are enough to start.
Stranded, solid and the temper underneath
Bare copper is sold by size and stranding. Solid is used where the conductor is short and fixed: a bonding jumper, a short ground connection, a bus tie. Stranded is used where it has to be pulled or where flexing would break a solid conductor. Above 2 AWG, almost everything in a plant is stranded.
Temper matters and is rarely printed. Soft-drawn or annealed copper bends easily and is what most grounding work uses. Hard-drawn is stiffer and used where the conductor has to hold a shape. Tinned copper has a thin tin coating for corrosion resistance in damp or chemical areas, and it looks dull silver rather than bright. A tinned lot is not the same as a bright lot, and the difference is visible at a glance. A coil that has been re-tied by hand also stands out, because mill tie wire and a contractor's tape wrap do not look alike.
Grids, bus and braid
The largest single source is a substation or switchgear ground grid. Four-ought bare stranded copper is buried in a grid pattern, welded at the crossings with exothermic connections, and brought up to equipment frames. When a yard is rebuilt the grid is cut out in lengths, and those lengths have burned ends and weld nuggets on them.
Bus is a different product: rectangular bar, drilled and often tinned, sometimes with heat-shrink colour at the ends. Braid is flat, woven from fine strands, and used for flexible bonding across a hinge or a movable frame. Neither is wire in the ordinary sense, and neither should be described as a reel.
Metal value against reuse value
This is the page where the distinction is sharpest, because bare copper has nothing to hide behind. Reuse value depends on the conductor being clean, dry, untinned or evenly tinned, and in lengths somebody can actually install. Metal value depends only on weight and cleanliness.
A fifty-foot coil of bright 4/0 stranded with clean cut ends is a grounding conductor somebody will buy for a ground ring or a service. The same copper with exothermic welds every six feet is not wire any more; it is copper with attachments, and those attachments are removed before it moves as metal. Solder, paint, oil and concrete splatter all push a lot toward the second category.
How a bare copper lot is read
Bare copper is usually the easiest material on a site to weigh and the hardest to describe, because there is no tag to photograph. The size, the stranding and the length have to be measured, and the ends have to be looked at.
- Size and stranding, measured rather than guessed
- Bright, tarnished or tinned, stated for each bundle
- Length of each coil, and whether it is one piece or several
- Attachments: welds, lugs, solder or concrete left on the wire
- Whether the copper came out of a trench, a busway or a panel
Related pages
Adjacent cities, wire families and regional briefs.
More in conductor metal and grounding
All wire typesQuestions sellers ask
Is tinned copper worth less than bright copper?
It is treated as a separate grade rather than as a lesser one, because the tin has to be dealt with at the mill. For reuse the answer is different: tinned conductor is often preferred in damp or chemical service, so a clean tinned lot can be more useful than a bright one that has been lying in a wet yard.
Can ground grid conductor be reused after it is dug up?
Rarely as conductor. The exothermic welds are cut out and the remaining lengths are short and often kinked from being pulled out of soil. It is recovered as copper. A grid that was never buried, still on a reel, is the opposite case and is reviewed as stock.
Do you separate bus bar from wire?
Yes, they are different products and are described separately. Bar is measured by width and thickness rather than by gauge, and drilled or tinned bar with heat-shrink ends is listed as bar. Mixing bar into a wire lot makes both harder to move.
Request a quote
Tell the desk what you have in Bare copper wire
Send the basics and a buyer reviews the lot, usually the same working day.
- Reviewed by a buyer, not a scale
- Reels, pallets, partials or a full truckload
- Anywhere in Ohio, one desk
- 01Send the wire type, quantity and pickup city.
- 02A buyer reviews the lot and replies with a basis.
- 03Freight and release are agreed, then the load is booked.
Second look at the lot
Everything helps, but the wire type, the quantity and the pickup city are enough to start.