Zanesville utility line surplus and ceramics plant cable

Utility line surplus at the pole yard

Reconductoring leaves the old wire on the reel. A crew pulls a new conductor through and the balance goes back to the pole yard, tagged, often with a third of the reel left. Over a season the yard accumulates underground distribution cable, primary and secondary, bare neutral and grounding conductor, in a dozen sizes.

Utility lots are the most legible material a seller can offer, because the tags are printed and the standards are consistent. The complication is ownership. On a municipal or co-op yard the material may already be booked as scrap, and the release may sit with a board rather than with the foreman who knows where it is.

Kilns, clay and control cable

Ceramics is heat work. Kiln control panels, thermocouple runs and the motor leads on blowers and augers all sit in an environment that bakes insulation from the outside. Cable that has spent years near a kiln is stiff and chalky where it was never meant to be warm.

What survives is the control and instrument cable, provided the shield is intact and the jacket has not gone brittle. A tray of thermocouple extension out of a pottery plant is worth a look. The same tray after a kiln rebuild or a fire usually is not.

Aggregate, wash plants and slurry

Sand and gravel operations are the hardest on portable cable. Pumps run submerged, conveyors run wet, and cable is dragged through slurry and over sharp stone. Abrasion takes a jacket off in a season, and the failure is usually invisible until the conductor is exposed.

Even so, aggregate yards produce clean copper. A wash plant's submersible leads are heavy gauge with a lot of metal per foot, and material that would be scrapped as cable is often worth more reviewed as conductor and insulation separately.

• Submersible lead with a nicked jacket
• Portable cord flattened by vehicle traffic
• Conductor corrosion through a pinhole
• Cable spliced with tape and no tag
• Earth conductor cut back at both ends

I-70 warehousing and the corridor trade

The I-70 corridor through Muskingum County is warehouse country, and warehouses hold overstock. Pallets of data cable bought for a fit-out that shrank, spools of building wire in a colour that went out of favour, and reels that were received and never booked in.

Warehouse lots are the easiest to move and the easiest to overvalue. Boxed data cable ages in practical terms: jacket and connectors both change with time, and a ten-year-old carton is not the same product as a new one. State the age plainly and value it accordingly. A pallet with the original cartons and a readable date code is worth a conversation; a pallet of loose boxes with no marking is a metal question.